In my district, we have decided that a lot of our science instruction grades K-4 will be done through literacy connections. Your program sounds like you have already identified appropriate novels that will engage students in the engineering process. Exciting! Thank you for giving a specific example with Muncha, Munch, Muncha. Is this a program that teachers/schools purchase? What is the grade span for the novel instruction? 

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for watching our video on Novel Engineering! After the success of this research project, we are very excited to be in the dissemination stage of our work. If you have any questions about Novel Engineering or Novel Engineering Challenges please don't hesitate to ask. We also appreciate any feedback and suggestions about the work we do. 

I really appreciate the link to books as I have led an NSF funded project that connects science and children's books. However, for this project (LEAP into Science) it has been much easier to use picture books or fairly simple books that are easily read aloud and thus we have targeted preK-4th. How have you selected your books - what criteria do you use - and in what ways do the books for middle vary from elementary. Would love to hear about some examples and also about how you would scale up for high school level as you suggest. 

Thank you for sharing your work here!  This is such a great way to situate problem solving into other classroom activities like reading a story, providing much needed context to the problems.  Like Dale, I'm interested in knowing how you select books. I'm also wondering if you looked at whether there is any sort of sweet spot is in terms of usage of classroom time dedicated to exploring the narrative vs. problem solving, prototyping and the other components of the iterative design process mentioned.

Thanks in advance!

One of the goals of the project is to not create large amounts of teachers so we work with them to asses the books they already use in their classrooms. Professional development is an integral part of Novel Engineering. During PD, we talk to teachers about the books they use and  help them anticipate would could happen in their classrooms. Generally, the class spends the same amount of time they usually would to read the book, just including additional conversations about problems in the book. To run through the engineering design process can take a varied amount of time depending on the goals of the teacher and the age of the students. Also, not all students work at the same pace so, for example, some groups spend more time planning than others. We've seen 5th graders do the "engineering" part of the project in 2 1/2 hours while another class spent six hours, one hour a week. Those students spent more time testing and iterating. We don't look at this as a one-time, annual experience so each time the students do it, the better they understanding the engineering and more functional their designs are. Let me know if you want clarification on anything. Thanks!

I guess I am surprised that teachers are using books in the classroom on a regular basis - especially at the middle and high school levels. Can you talk more about this? Examples? the types of characters that seem most impactful and maleable for this? How you address issues of gender and stereotypes in the text?

Neat project! I love how your project connects engineering design with literacy in such a natural way. We've recently been doing STEM PD with teachers in a local district that has decided to focus its elementary summer school on engineering. Your approach would be a nice fit for them, as they're excited about doing hands-on engineering activities during the summer session, but also concerned about developing participants' literacy skills during that time. I'll definitely be sharing your video with them!  : )

Love your quote about failure: "If something doesn't work, we can go back and fix it and it's not a big deal." It's great to see that you've identified ways to best support teachers with professional development—we know that PD is critical to the success of any program.