We welcome your feedback on our project and we are interested in learning about your work. In particular, we would love to hear about the following:

1) Developing pre-service teachers' confidence and competence in engineering

2) Supporting interdisciplinary team-work

3) Strategies for helping inservice teachers integrate engineering in preK-6 classrooms

4) Culturally-responsive/community-focused PreK-12 engineering projects

5) Research on preservice teachers' self-efficacy 

This is an exciting project. I like the innovation behind the switch to virtual during the peak of the pandemic. This is the way to get the young ones excited about engineering and perhaps develop an interest in STEM very early on. The demonstration projects are exciting and, quite frankly, impressive! I voted!!

I really like that these kids clearly had fun but had a clear purpose behind what they were doing. And the creation and sharing through videos clearly gives them such ownership over their work. With the pandemic changing, do you have plans to continue with a different challenge or purpose? 

What a great example of pandemic learning!!!  I am so impressed with how you were able to turn your project from a one audience in normal times to a whole new audience in at home learning.  I have lots questions because I am in year three of a covid classroom teacher and want to understand how this was implemented.  Did you have partner schools and teachers that you were already connected to?  Was this an enrichment opportunity?  In other words..  How did you connect with this particular group of students that were not in the age group you were initially intending to work with?

This project shows the possibilities of strong home-school connections ! I loved seeing the excitement of the chidren as they shared their covid helpers.I am also all about the integration of the disciplines. I am wondering about the preservice teachers, did they an engineering class prior to this happening or were they taking one concurrently? I heard the preservice say they felt more confident as teachers but I would like to know more about their STEM mindset beginning the project.

In the beginning you shared that this was an afterschool STEM Club, so what I thinking about is accessibility and access? Prior to Covid what were the opportunities in regrads to access? What were the costs connected to the program and who paid for them. 

As a former classroom teacher I have been thinking about your questions about strategies to integrate in prek-6 classrooms. The first thing that comes to mind is the opportunities the NGSS performance expectations provide for this. When I reflect on your video one PE immediately comes to mind and it is a grade 4 expectation "Apply scientific ideas to design, test, and refine a device that converts energy from one form to another. 4-PS3-4"  My thoughts are how might you show teachers you can help them do work that they are expected to do without making more work for them, especially right now!

Hi Kathy, thanks for your post. This collaboration between preservice teachers, engineering students, and 5th graders is part of our larger NSF-funded project. The larger project provides three opportunities for the preservice teachers to partner with engineering students to teach engineering lessons. The robotics project is what we call Collab 2, or the second opportunity for the preservice teachers to engage in the project. Most of the Collab 2 preservice teachers do not have any prior experience with engineering, but a few had participated in Collab 1, where they partner with engineering students and teach a 1 hour lesson to 4th graders focused on an engineering design challenge. In most cases, whether the preservice teachers have their initial exposure to engineering in Collab 1 or Collab 2, they are very unfamiliar with engineering, intimidated by it, and apprehensive about the prospect of teaching an engineering lesson. We found that our Collabs help demystify engineering for the education students and make it feel more accessible, like something they could see themselves teaching in their own future classroom. 

Prior to COVID, we ran the afterschool technology club in person at a local school. We recruited 5th graders with the help of the principal and the kids' math teacher. There are costs associated with the program. We purchased enough Hummingbird Bit robotics kits so every student (education, engineering and 5th grader) could have their own kit for the semester. We also purchased craft supplies and hold a family showcase at the end of each year. I also have TAs that help me run the clubs. These costs are covered by our NSF grant. We are lucky to have this funding and it definitely makes it easier to pull this off!

As far as helping teachers integrate, I think you hit on a critical point: how can we help teachers bring these sorts of engineering challenges into their instruction without creating more work for them. We've also been running summer workshops for inservice teachers that focus on cheaper, shorter-term design challenges. We hope to give them a chance to learn and teach each other simple engineering design lessons during the workshop and then send them home with the supplies to try it in their own classrooms.  In Virginia, we don't use the NGSS as much because we have our Standards of Learning, but the objectives are very similar, and I agree, we need to show teachers how they can meet these standards through engineering design challenges without too much investment on their part.

This is a great project! Its fantastic to see the positive environment you are establishing for your parenting pre-service teachers. If/when you all are planning to go back in person, do you anticipate having the same family presence in person? I'd love to hear about the transition. 

Love this project--seeing what people built, and how excited they were about it, was really heart warming. Loved how it brought families into the mix in a way that didn't seem stressful. Would love more information about what the process was like for the engineering students advancing development of some of the youth concepts. Did they have conversations with the youth and get feedback? And if so, what did they think? Great work!

Katherine

Awesome work Dr. Kidd! I love to see children gain the opportunity to learn while also fostering their own creativity. I was very impressed.

Thanks for sharing your project.  This project was a win win situation for all involved!  The Education students learned valuable lessons, reported an increase in their self-efficacy, and were able to build lasting connections because of the nature of this project.  I LOVE that several of the students are parents and saw first hand the impact of early introduction to engineering concepts through the eyes of their own children. It was great to see the footage of the elementary students discussing their robots - I could feel their excitement and enthusiasm and wanted to know more about their robots! The introduction of the project in the home environment made the concepts relevant and meaningful for the families as well and created an experience the entire family could take part in. This is a perfect example of some of the positive things that happened as a result of everyone having to pivot and use creativity during the pandemic. 

What measures did you use to measure the pre-service teachers' confidence, self-efficacy, and knowledge of engineering concepts? Was there a pre- and post- instrument involved? Your video mentioned that the robotics project was typically implemented with fifth grade students each year.  Compared to previous years, did you notice an increase in student engagement and/or family involvement during the pandemic version of the project?

Thanks again.

I find this such a great example of responding to pandemic learning.  Am I correct in that you working primarily with students that self-select through a club model for this project? Is there a goal to make this more widely available to others? I am also trying to understand how are pre-service teachers participate. The video clearly showed some deep learning for these pre-service teachers.  Are they helping to design and implement the club activity?  Is there a goal that they will implement this in their eventual classroom or just build the confidence and skills to design and implement other kinds of STEM learning?  I am trying to put the pieces together.  Thanks!

This continues to be an outstanding project, and, if anything, the pandemic pivot seems to have improved the project, and by that I mean the involvement of the parents. It is key that parents understand the importance of computer science and engineering as PK-6 curricular topics. Without parental support, we will have difficulty making headway into the early curriculum. Here, the ed+gineering project is demonstrating how that family support can be built. I really loved how in some families it became a family project - how must of the animaltronics were of pets, and how basic supplies found around the house were re-purposed into the robotic bodies and devices. This is a very special project that keeps on growing. Way to go, Jennifer, Krishnan and all.

Wow! Thank you for sharing this work -- it is great to see children engaged in engineering even at a time when learning and activities were happening in isolation. I love the "Covid Companion" idea-- how did children come up with this idea? Do the facilitators use a problem identification/solving framework to get students thinking critically about the problems they plan to address through their engineering design?

I really enjoyed your video. Loved how the kids engaged in building their COVID companions and the teachers-in-training gained self-confidence that they can apply what they learned with larger groups of kids. Have you considered doing some research on what happens with the parents who engaged in the project? 

Wow, what a powerful project. I loved seeing and hearing from the students. They were clearly engaged and excited. I will look for research findings about your project.

Thanks for your comments, Rhonda. I am glad you liked our work! Here is a recent SITE conference paper based on our past implementation that provides some insights into research findings on one of the collaboration models (presented in the video) of our overall project--

Kidd, J., Kaipa, K., Gutierrez, K., Pazos, P., Ayala, O. & Ringleb, S. (2020). “Zooming In” on Robotics during COVID-19: A Preservice Teacher, an Engineering Student, and a 5th Grader Engineer Robotic Flowers via Zoom. In E. Langran (Ed.), Proceedings of SITE Interactive 2020 Online Conference (pp. 503-512). Online: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved May 17, 2022 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/218194/.

I LOVE this project! There are so many layers to it. It's wonderful how relationships are providing motivation for pre-service teachers and students at a variety of levels. I also love how the project is finding a pandemic silver lining - using the pandemic as a way to encourage students to see and understand the value of engineering in their - and others' - everyday lives. Bravo!

I love how many wonderful, integrated aspects there are to this project. The collaboration among children, pre-service teachers, and engineers in a relevant context that also bridges remote and hands-on instruction - and brings family connections in as well! - is so powerful and engaging.