Engineers of Tomorrow Jilliane Brinkman William Wandro Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering Mentor: Prashant Rajan Department of English | Communication Studies

K-12 STEM Education Focus on future STEM majors in college STEM careers Increased math and science skills Development of problem solving skills

Purpose Passion project Prior experiences with elementary education How can concepts/topics from Industrial Engineering be made relevant and accessible to elementary school students? Introducing engineering optimization strategies into elementary school classrooms.

Currently Available Engineering is Elementary (Cunningham, 2009) Beautiful but expensive Can we design frugal solutions? Project Lead the Way (Bottoms & Uhn, 2005) Not every school has access Access for all enabled by individual and collaborative effort

Formulation Activity integrated into day’s lesson plan Problem solving strategies from IE 312: Optimization Current learning objectives implemented in classroom

The Intervention Step 1 How old is the tree? Step 2 No activity Group A (N=12) Group B (N=12) Step 1 How old is the tree? Step 2 No activity Anchor Chart, Books Step 3 Free time Step 4 Application exercise

Step 1: How old is the tree? “I don’t know” “Cuz it looked pretty old.” “Because it has cracks in it, and you said it’s a tree.” “It looked like it was 1,000 years old. It was lighter.” “Cuz I am five years old, then I just guessed a number.” “I like the top because it is clean.” “It looked really old on the bottom. The top and sides were dirty too.” “Because I just looked at it and it looked like its 100.”

Step 1: Prior to Intervention Reasoning: dirty wood samples, the size of the cross-section, or the knots on the bark

Group B Step 2 Tree books Definition class activity Tree description worksheet

Variability in student ability Formative Excellent

Intervention Anchor chart Final age of trees Age activity Subtraction Method Anchor chart

Group B Step 3: How old is the tree? Max age of trees: 10s to 100 years old Min age of trees: 1 and seed Reasoning: There were not many rings inside the tree The tree did not seem very big Now capable of subtraction based on components

Group B Step 4: Application exercise Formative Excellent

Group B Step 4: Subtraction Method

Feedback Anchor chart: Understood each step Related each step to original problem Recall: Purpose of activity Finalize a solving method Reception: Excited to learn about tree age Fun to count rings and answer

References Bottoms, G., & Uhn, J. (2007). Project Lead the Way works: A new type of career and technical program. Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Education Board. Cunningham, C. M. (2009). Engineering is elementary. The Bridge, 30(3), 11-17.