Melissa and Michelle: What a wonderful video! And what a powerful idea - to link empathy with engineering. In our early STEM work, we have similarly found that engineering naturally aligns to the hands-on and playful experiences that children (and teachers and families) engage in. I really appreciated how the scenarios you shared in the video represent authentic problems or challenges that resonate with young children. Can you share more about the kinds of activities you did in your co-design workshops to come up with some of these ideas? I'd also love to learn what other engineering practices you have found children engage in easily and whether there are practices that they needed more support from adults to engage in (and what strategies you have found worked well). Thanks again for sharing such great work!

Thanks so much for your comments and questions, Ximena! We took multiple approaches to the co-design process both during the initial workshops and in follow-up ones after teachers had implemented one or more of the lessons. First, we had teachers work together to complete one of the activities. We then facilitated a group conversation/interview where teachers reflected on the activity, how it relates to what they already do, and how they would support their own students in doing the activity. A critical part of these conversations was having teachers discuss their specific teaching contexts (e.g., the unique characteristics of their students, schools, neighborhoods) and how they might adapt the activity based on those contexts in order to create  authentic and meaningful learning opportunities that allow children to connect what they are doing to their own lived experiences. After teachers had implemented one of the activities, we asked them to participate in follow-up discussions where they design their own engineering and empathy activity.

No surprisingly, we've found that scaffolding the experiences is key. Teachers emphasize the importance of things like pre-teaching vocabulary like empathy and engineer, using stories as an entryway and frame to engineering challenges, and building in moments for children to reflect on how they would feel as the character/end user of an engineering challenge. Planning these moments helps children practice perspective-taking, a key part of empathy development, while also serving as an initial part of the planning phase.

That's such an important point, Jasmine. We do indeed use stories as a starting point for an engineering challenge and have also found that narrative framing - with deliberate teacher prompts and facilitation - supports empathy and perspective-taking in particular. We are big fans of the work going on at NYSCI!

Thanks so much for your comments and questions, Christina! One of the inspirations for our project was the work of Jo Walther and colleagues at UGA and their research around empathy and engineering at the college level. We would be very excited to think about the full skills trajectory and impacts of integrated empathy and engineering experiences across all grade levels. I think the general approach that we are taking, using activities that generally encourage thinking about who you are designing for or with, would be intrinsically motivating to children across K-12. When students are engaging in the steps of the engineering design process, encouraging them to pause and think about the feelings and needs of the users of the design at each step of the process could be an interesting approach for teachers to take!

Hi again, I plugged your video to Julie Robinson and her team, so I will do the same for her video here. I encourage you to check out Teachers' Culturally Relevant Engineering Self-Efficacy.

This is a great question, Suzy! We probably could write an entire paper just on this. I'll highlight a couple of comments from teachers regarding their contexts. We know that teachers were very interested in adding or enhancing contexts for the activities that were culturally relevant. For example, we have an activity centered on engineering a shelter to protect a family from a snowy winter, and some of the teachers we worked with were excited to use a storybook that featured an immigrant family coming from the same country (with a warm climate!) that many of their students were from. I'll also note that we did hear from some teachers that they felt they needed to do more fine motor skills support for the hands-on engineering this year than they might have in past years--impacts of the pandemic and perhaps less focus on fine motor skill development. So that's perhaps a short-term context, but something that I think we'll want to track over the next couple years to better understand impacts. 

Thanks for your comments, Margo! To be very honest, flexibility in recruitment was the name of the game over the course of our project. Our teacher participant process was massively impacted by the pandemic. Originally we had intended to work very closely with our public schools, but research activities have been largely suspended in the district for the past two years. Instead we worked primarily with other PreK/K classrooms (part of our local Universal PreK initiative, parochial schools, Head Start, and private schools. While we did have some cases of multiple classrooms participating in one school, we worked across a variety of schools. We generally advertised our teacher professional development workshops through Boston Children's Museum's email lists and social media (we tend to reach many folks across the state and more broadly in New England). 

Thanks for your great observations and questions! We’ve found that stories are a great entry point. Not only do they build on what teachers and children are already doing, but stories for this age group tend to have characters that children can easily relate to, especially with help from their teachers. In choosing stories, we looked for ones that allow for design challenges that are developmentally appropriate and not cost prohibitive. Most stories that meet these criteria inevitably offer opportunities to engage children in empathy. In fact, this project is inspired by the work of Jo Walther at UGA and his idea that engineering design – whether at the preschool or college level – virtually always involves an end user whose needs, preferences, and perspectives must be taken into account by the engineer.  

As for challenges…not surprisingly, Covid has posed the greatest challenge. Like many projects, we had to shift our plans for in-person data collection to remote and we haven’t yet stepped inside a classroom. We’re quite eager to grow this work. From the research perspective, I see measurement of our outcomes as a challenge/exciting avenue to explore.

Hi Dorothy,

Thanks for commenting - it's always helpful to hear your insights! We haven’t yet finished data collection, but so far teachers haven’t raised any challenges beyond the logistics of remote data collection. During teacher workshops, teacher descriptions of how they had previously implemented engineering activities suggest that they often don't have enough time for the re-design and reflection phases of EDP. I will say that recruiting preschool classrooms was much easier than kindergarten classrooms, which we hypothesize is in part – as you suggested – due to kindergarten teachers having less flexibility in their curricula. 

Looking forward to building on this work and the good work you all are doing!

I agree about the student enthusiasm and voice in the video! It is great to see the impact of this approach for young students. I also agree that the types of measures and impacts Latrenda has noted would be great to get some insight on. So many schools are struggling with how to integrate SEL in academic instruction -- too often they treat those as two separate and disconnected efforts. Your works, with any evidence of impact, could really help schools see how these can complement each other.

Looking forward to more details!

Thanks for responding and sharing!