Excite Kids about Engineering: Design Squad[TM] and Engineer Your Life[TM] Resources Make It Easy: Design Squad Is a Powerful Way of Introducing Students to the Engineering Process
2008; Volume: 67; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0746-3537
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Education and Engineering Focus
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What do you get when you mix some rubber bands, cardboard, wooden skewers, and blank CDs? Thanks to the Design Squad Educator's Guide, you get a racecar--and teachers across the country are using it to have their students engineer the zippiest racecars possible. At the Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School in Manalapan, New Jersey, Donna Falk's eighth grade science class is discovering just how fun and engaging engineering challenges can be. Like real engineers, Ms. Falk's students work in teams, using the easy-to-follow instructions in the Design Squad Educator's Guide to assemble the parts. The cardboard forms the car body, the skewer becomes the axle, CDs are the wheels, and the rubber bands provide the power. But assembly is only the beginning of the activity. After about ten minutes of building their rubber-band cars, Carl and Maria are the first team in Ms. Falk's class ready to test their prototype. In the testing area, they wind the axle several times (twisting the rubber band, which creates potential, or stored, energy), place their car on the starting line, and release it. Off it goes. Backwards! After a good laugh, they return to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong. Surprisingly, they aren't discouraged. They know from watching episodes of PBS's Design Squad that testing and redesigning are vital to solving an engineering problem. In each half-hour episode, the show's teenage cast puts the entire design process into action--define the problem, brainstorm solutions, design, build, test, evaluate, redesign, and finally, share your solution. On the next try, Carl and Maria's car zooms forward. With the first problem solved, they continue to tinker until it works efficiently enough to zip six feet across the floor. The Rubber-Band Car activity is just one of the Design Squad challenges teachers can use to nurture students' problem-solving and teamwork skills. Whether you're looking for activities to supplement your curriculum or to develop a brand new unit, Design Squad has an array of resources that make it easy to open students' eyes to the exciting world of engineering. Got an hour? A day? A week? Design Squad has something for you. Introduce the engineering design process with Design Squad episodes Borrowing from TV's hugely popular reality-competition format, Design Squad features two teams of teenagers who tackle a wide array of engineering challenges for an actual client--from building a machine a restaurant can use to make pancakes to a summer sled for LL Bean. In the final episode, the top two individual scorers battle for the Grand Prize--a $10,000 college scholarship, provided by the Intel Foundation. Design Squad is one of the few places on television where kids can learn about engineering and the rich variety of jobs that engineers do. (Season One of Design Squad premiered on PBS in 2007 with 13 half-hour episodes. Season Two's 13 half-hour episodes begin airing this April.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Design Squad is a powerful way of introducing students to the engineering process. Each episode tells the story of how the two teams tackled a particular challenge. As they watch, students see engineering in action. The design process and its iterative nature are clearly presented and made visual throughout each episode. A graphic announces each stage (e.g., brainstorm, design, build, test, and redesign) as the teams construct their solutions. These graphics make it easy for teachers to discuss the design process with students as well as how engineers approach a project. Over the course of the season, Design Squaders wrestle with a broad range of challenges. The show's hosts are real engineers who guide eight contestants as the teams work on projects like constructing cardboard furniture for IKEA, building hockey-net targets for a Boston Bruins player, and designing underwater prostheses for an amputee dancer. …
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