For classroom teachers, home-schoolers, out-of-school programs, informal educators – anyone teaching engineering to kids.
From How to Teach Kids Engineering – 5 Keys to Success 4/5 republished with permission…
4. Go for Fast Results, and Then Get in Over Your Heads
When starting a new type of project, start with something small where the kids will see fast results. Unfortunately there are times on engineering where things are not going as planned and it takes some time to work through the problems. The key is to help the kids taste success early so that they stick around through the trials.
One way to do this is to do a smaller version of the project with very few obstacles. When we first invested in our LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics set, we started by building a few robots from the instructions provided by LEGO. The kids were very familiar with LEGO style instructions and they were able to see something work right away without too much effort. This early success create the initial excitement. Once the initial excitement is there, it’s time to go big.
When you take on an ambitious project, you and the kids will learn valuable lessons you did not anticipate, even if you do not succeed. After following the instructions for a few LEGO Mindstorms projects, I threw out the idea to my kids of building a dancing robot. This presented a few challenges – we needed to build a robot that was stable enough to not fall over while dancing and we needed to figure out how to synchronize a robot’s movements to music. As we dove into the project and got to the point of making a video, we also learned about photography, video editing, and sound editing.
We’ve gone on to create multiple new projects with our Mindstorms set – a basketball robot, a music box, and a Rubik’s cube alarm clock. We are still continuing to learn as a result of these projects – we are learning about CAD and publishing tools so that we can create building instructions for our project and share it with the world.
engineering 4 kids 