Hi Tamara! Yes, the use of narrative/story is absolutely intentional. One of the major theories we’re exploring through our work is called Imaginative Education, developed by Kieran Egan at Simon Fraser University. Imaginative Education involves using developmentally appropriate stories to engage students’ emotions and help them learn more deeply. In addition, stories provide context by illustrating the meaning of the content. For example, in the Talk to Me novel, readers see that engineering design is important because it’s the way the characters find a solution and solve a crime. Artificial intelligence is important because it helps Maddie, a character with a real anxiety disorder called Selective Mutism, feel comfortable enough to talk. Does that make sense? Let me know if you have other questions about this!

Hi Vivian! We remember your great comments and questions from last year—thank you! IE tends to be comparatively easy to implement because it’s fun and because any topic can be woven into an exciting story. On the other hand, KB is more challenging because it requires educators and facilitators to relinquish control of the conversation. They have to pose a question and then leave it open to exploration and discussion by students. This is difficult—especially for educators with no background in engineering—because there’s the unknown of where the conversation will lead. The good news is, as other presenters of story-based projects have also said, is that the use of IE/story helps educators feel more comfortable approaching the often unfamiliar topic of engineering.

We work closely with educators implementing our materials to get their feedback on implementing KB specifically and Through My Window as a whole (another challenge here is the wide variety of afterschool programs and formal classrooms out there). Those who have allowed students to explore open-ended questions like those posed in the novel, online learning adventures, and offline enrichment activities have been impressed by students’ level of engagement and sophisticated discourse. We have also used educator feedback to improve our offline enrichment activities and improve the design and functionality of our upcoming learning adventures.

Our student surveys indicate that they finish the program better understanding the breadth of what engineers do, that they’ve learned a lot about artificial intelligence and design, and that they might consider becoming engineers. I hope this provides some response to your questions. Please feel free to ask more!

Isabel,
Thank you for sharing this video and project work. Having recently reported on interviews and survey results of engineering education stakeholders in Massachusetts, I know that there is not only a lack of educator confidence about teaching engineering in the K-12 setting, but there is also a general lack of agreement about what engineering education is or isn’t. Your work will help address those issues!

Thank you so much, Catherine! We’d love to hear more about your work and impression of the K-12 landscape in Massachusetts!

Sure. The report can be found here: http://ceeo.tufts.edu/research/projectsMEIDC.htm. Beth was one of our interviewees!

Thank you, Vivian! We don’t currently have a way of tracking participants over time (in part because we’re working with so many different schools/programs/settings), although it would be great if we could implement something like that in the future. For now, the best we have is our pre- and post-surveys.

Hi Sally—great question! We don’t have any specific resources to support teachers in that regard. However, we dedicate time to this issue in our professional development sessions with educators. We try to engage educators in the idea that engineering is as much about open-ended thinking, creativity, and innovation as it is about math and science, and that seems to make them more comfortable because it means they won’t be “wrong,” either. The other thing that seems to help is having the questions we want educators to pose to students based in the context of our novel or online stories. An open-ended question (even if it’s related to engineering) about a story feels more familiar than one solely about engineering.
We clearly don’t have a silver bullet, and we’d love to hear more about the kinds of work you’ve done regarding student talk in science classrooms!

Hi Sally, after discussing with my co-presenter, there is one other thing we do to help teachers with discussion. We provide them with a “toolbox” of ways to better structure open-ended discussions and make it less daunting.
One example of this is posing a question and having students use sticky notes to share their ideas and build on others’ ideas. This gives every student—even those who might not be comfortable talking—a chance to respond, and removes the potential for awkward silence that could make teachers uncomfortable.
Another example is what we call “idea pillars,” which are posters with open-ended questions like “Can __________ think?” and options like washing machines, iPhones, and Google. Students can vote “yes” or “no” using dot stickers. Then, teachers can facilitate discussion using related questions like “What does it mean to think?” and “Is being able to follow programming, like a washing machine does, the same as thinking?”

The toolbox for open ended discussions is very important to learn (even though sometimes hard to implement:) Do teachers ever invite engineers or others who are comfortable with deeper content into their classrooms to participate in such discussions? Or do you do this in the professional development forums—and then capture the discussion through video or response sets?

Hi Vivian—another great suggestion! Beth, one of our Co-PIs, is an engineer and one of the leaders of our professional development. We do facilitate discussions in our PD sessions but haven’t filmed them or created response sets. Sometimes we have the author of our novel, who has a masters in engineering, visit local programs and answer students’ questions about both writing and engineering. Throughout all of this, we want teachers to feel empowered even if they aren’t engineers and even if there aren’t engineers in the room.

Thank you! For the future of our project, we’re hoping to create a transmedia experience sort of like the 39 Clues series or the Skeleton Creek series, but about engineering! We want to keep a lot of the focus on books. Having books allows English teachers to integrate STEM into their classes and allows educators without extensive STEM background feel more comfortable facilitating an engineering curriculum.
We haven’t tried virtual reality or virtual experience, but if we had the resources for it, it would be a really interesting thing to explore in the future, especially for our online content!

I love that you are incorporating the arts and humanities into the process of STEM discovery—an incredibly integrated approach.

Thank you, Jim! The artwork is actually done by Smith College undergraduate students, primarily Evanleigh Davis.
Our online learning adventures allow students to explore the real-world engineering topics through journaling, games, and videos. For example, students watch videos and journal about “What is Intelligence,” learn about algorithms as the basis of classical artificial intelligence by playing number games, and talk to a “chatterbot” to determine whether it’s sophisticated enough to replace Rio’s (one of the characters from the book) brain. Offline activities allow students to further explore engineering topics related to artificial intelligence like facial recognition, coding, and machine learning.

By the end of the calendar year, we hope to have two new learning adventures (with associated offline enrichment activities) available about ethics and engineering design. The design adventure will feature interactive games and journaling about design challenges like AC vs. DC electricity and Apollo 13. The ethics adventure will include cyberbullying as well as professional engineering-related ethical dilemmas.

Let me know if I answered your question or if you’d like any more details!

Hi Christine, thanks for your comment! We’re working on some videos—in particular, some educator testimonials—right now, but they’re not quite ready. We’re also working on getting some footage of students and Through My Window being used in classrooms. Your video did a wonderful job incorporating all of those elements!

For now, I can give you some brief quotes of things educators and students have said.

Educators:
“I thought Through My Window was a fabulous program… It engaged my third, fourth, fifth, sixth graders in ways that I had never imagined were possible…For an educator, that’s the most amazing thing; to see children learning and having fun while they do it.”
“I learned a lot during the program…It changed my view of engineering. I was part of the group of people that thought that engineering was about math and science, about building bridges, and I learned that it’s more than that. You just need to be curious and have some problem-solving skill to be a good engineer.”

Students:
“The website is a good way to get better at reading and helps you to think in a different way.”
“It was a great experience and it was super fun and exciting. And it also always left you on a cliffhanger so you had to read on.”
“I would recommend this to a friend because it was a great way to understand and grasp the idea of engineering while having fun.”
“I really enjoy Through My Window and it’s a really great website to go on because you learn and have fun at the same time.”

Thanks for getting back to me with these great quotes! I’ll keep a look out for those upcoming testimonial videos. Thanks for the kind words about our video as well.

Hi Geralyn, great question! So far, we’ve seen that both boys and girls are equally engaged by Through My Window, which is what we had intended and hoped would happen. We did this by creating activities that appealed to students’ intelligence, rather than gender stereotypes like pink and princesses (a new trend among STEM resources for girls) or men in hard hats (the route of many traditional STEM resources). We also use elements like mystery, limits and extremes of reality, heroes and heroines, etc that Kieran Egan, developer of Imaginative Education, lays out as particularly appealing to students of this age, regardless of gender.

Thanks. That’s a really interesting route to go. We’re testing right now for some comic illustrations. this is helpful.