Opportunities for reasoning about energy within elementary school engineering experiences

Abstract

Much of recent elementary engineering curriculum development and research has focused on supporting young students’ design abilities related to the “engineering design process.” However, engineering design also involves attention to physical principles and the modeling of how physical principles affect design outcomes. One of these principles is that energy must be transferred to any designed artifact by its power system, which is specified by the engineering designers, in order for the designed artifact to perform work. The purpose of this chapter is to identify opportunities for students to reason about energy during existing elementary school engineering activities. A review of literature on the engineering profession as well as of guidelines for K-12 science and engineering/technology education resulted in three main goals for young students’ applied knowledge of energy: the ability to recognize when a technology needs energy input, the ability to consider various modes of energy storage, and the ability to identify several possible energy transfer strategies. These learning goals then served as a basis for an analysis of the engineering design activities in Family Engineering (Jackson M, Heil D, Chadde J, Hutzler N, Family Engineering: an activity and event planning guide. Foundation for Family Science and Engineering: Michigan Technological University, 2011), a guide with 26 hands-on challenges useful for introducing children and their families to engineering. The analysis revealed that while several activities explicitly reference connections to energy concepts, even more activities have strong implicit opportunities for students to use reasoning about energy as an engineering design tool.