Engineering 4 Kids (e4k) – a kid-friendly exploration of everything engineering as a collection of stories about people, places and things, design challenges, projects, games – all yours to discover
engineering4kids.org – domain name, blog
Collection – stories
Audience : Middle school, self-directed
- Most teachers have little or no background in Engineering, no time and no support so the E in STeM is “silent”. We are here to help. We are building a collection of stories, resources and activities for kids to discover Engineering on their own.
Stories – some examples of the broad range of topics included
- structures – Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge, Costa Concordia
- objects – Paper airplanes, Gears
- technologies – Raspberry Pi, Materials
- people – Henry Ford People
- engineering ideas – Simple machines, Aerodynamics, Momentum, Windsurfing buoyancy
- society – Go Green, Assistive technologies, Food
- tools, skills – Programming, Games and simulations
Feedback, suggestions on…
- story layout – template – order, coverage good
- introduction – keywords, definitions, links to more comprehensive content, picture, illustration, people
- What’s the problem? – engineering design process – prompts and questions, facts and questions – Statue of Liberty
Ask (What? Ask questions, understand the need, identify the problem, define) * Imagine (So what? Imagine, brainstorm, explore, discover) * Plan (Now what? Plan, design) * Create (Do it. Create, try it out) * Improve (If this then what? Improve, make it better) - That’s engineering * Engineering ideas – connecting to engineering thinking, systems, components
- Do it – activities that kids can do on their own, online games, simulations, hands-on with no / minimum supervision
- News, updates, Learn more… – more links to related online resources, additions to basic content
- ..r0 work in progress – outline and some information, but needs work – Computer Aided Engineering, Nuclear], Pacemaker – fine as placeholder – may actually be enough information, even if not complete
- tags – categories, number per story
Who…
- advisory board – kids – what works, what’s missing – story format, sections, content areas, navigation, classification
- reviewers – check stories – complete, interesting, identify missing items
- engineers – reviews, advise, suggest – subject matter experts, what’s the engineering here?
- contributors – research – information, activities, pictures, videos. suggest additional stories, topics
- authors – edit existing stories, write new stories
- media – pictures, animations, video – Wikimedia Commons, Flickr BY.NC.SA, YouTube, Vimeo
- curators – manage collection
Resources – sources of content for additional stories
- engineering news magazine – weekly updates, aggregates multiple sources
- ideas for e4k stories – suggest basis for additional stories, this list is updated periodically
- Wikipedia for Schools – selection of articles from Wikipedia used by school children around the world. 6000 articles, 26 million words and 50,000 images
About e4k
- work in progress, always CBB (could be better)
- doing, thinking, asking – engineering, applied math and science
- kid-friendly sources, open, ever-green, updates, mostly links to other sources with summary, description
- Creative Commons – BY-SA-NC – Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commercial – all e4k, most (but not all) sources, too
- contributors – kids, engineers, educators, parents, global community
engineering 4 kids 