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CUE 2004

SPECIAL ACADEMIC PROGRAMS
Integrated Teaching and Learning Program: K-12 Engineering Corps - Creating a Sustainable K-12 Future

Elementary school students build rockets as part of a hands-on unit taught by a CU engineering student at a local school.

A major challenge facing the Integrated Teaching and Learning (ITL) Program's ambitious K-12 engineering initiative is how to sustain a program that introduces young students to hands-on engineering in a pervasive way once startup funding has expired.

Supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, this K-12 classroom program engages graduate and undergraduate engineering students to develop and teach hands-on curricula that exploit engineering as a vehicle for the integration of math and science. The goal is to motivate youngsters to imagine themselves pursuing careers in engineering and technology, and encourage them to make appropriate academic choices.

One sustainable approach piloted this spring is the K-12 Engineering Corps—a service learning technical elective for upper-division undergraduate engineering students to earn credit for teaching the engineers of tomorrow in K-12 classrooms today. The Engineering Corps is team-taught by Jackie Sullivan, ITL co-director and director of K-12 engineering, and Mindy Zarske, ITL K-12 engineering coordinator. Together, they guide a cohort of engineering students who teach captivating, hands-on, real-world engineering lessons to a diverse student population at Creekside Elementary School in Boulder.

The teachers welcome the E-Corps students" enthusiasm for teaching and trust them as role models for their young students. E-Corps teams are challenged to distill complex engineering concepts into readily understood, age-appropriate, hands-on engineering activities for youngsters. And, the E-Corps students quickly learn what professors already know: One really learns technical material when one is accountable for teaching it!

While much of the curriculum taught has already been developed and classroom-tested by graduate students, the E-Corps students also develop new lessons for inclusion in the TeachEngineering Digital Library, which will go online later this year. This unique collection, funded by NSF, will make available a rich array of searchable, standards-based, hands-on K-12 engineering curricula for classroom delivery by K-12 teachers at modest materials cost.

itll.colorado.edu