Engineering and Technology

During today's lesson debrief I learned how important it is to make Engineering and Technology connections often within one's science lessons. I had no idea that 25% of the fifth grade MCAS test will focus on what these connections teach students. However, as I look over the steps of the Engineering Design process, I see that I had actually used many of these steps within both today's and last week's lessons. In both lessons, my co-teacher and I had students attempt to model how they thought they should set up their experiment materials in order to test for specific data. During their efforts, the students were identifying the problem they must solve, developing possible solutions, selecting the best solutions, constructing their prototype models, communicating their solutions to others, and redesigning if needed. Although some groups did not design their models in the "correct way" (according to how the lesson plan would have done it), I still had them communicate to me why they designed their models how they did and what they thought it would do. I was impressed by how much detail they put into their planning and conceptions of how the model would function. After each group had constructed and explained their model, my co-teacher and I showed the class the way the lesson plan said to construct the model and explained how it worked. Then, I asked all the students to think about what their models would do in their current states and to make adjustments to them if needed. After this part, all the groups had constructed models that would work perfectly for testing the variables in the experiment. Overall I think seeing and discussing the ingenuity that the students have to offer has been the most fun for me all semester. I hope that I will be able to include another activity that will allow students to brainstorm and create modles to test for certain variables.