For almost 15 years, CU Boulder and other partners have been developing a one-of-a-kind curricular resource for K-12 educators to teach engineering.
The online library is called—you guessed it—TeachEngineering.org, and it offers more than 1,550 free, hands-on, design-focused, classroom-tested lessons aligned with national and state STEM standards.
Now, a new partnership with the National Academy of Engineering is expanding opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share advice related to using these hands-on lessons—with the goal to ultimately improve youth STEM education nationwide.
Two years ago, the NAE launched LinkEngineering.org, an online community that connects educators who are designing and using engineering curricula in classrooms, after-school settings and informal learning environments outside school. The website (whose development was supported by Chevron) provides educators with background information on engineering, lesson plans and videos, but most importantly, with online message boards to exchange ideas and success stories.
With our new partnership, when educators browse lesson ideas on TeachEngineering.org, they’ll see a new link on the right side of the webpage: “Educators Share Experiences.” In one click, educators can share with the LinkEngineering community how they used or modified the TeachEngineering materials and how it worked in their classroom. It’s sort of a virtual living room for teachers to share their experiences.
Besides helping other teachers, it will also allow us at TeachEngineering to make improvements to our vast resource collection, which already draws more than 3 million unique users (mostly teachers) each year.
You can read more about the partnership in today’s announcement from the NAE. The NAE also partnered with the National Science Teachers Association, American Society for Engineering Education, International Technology and Engineering Educators Association, Council of State Science Supervisors and Achieve Inc. to create LinkEngineering.
All of us involved with TeachEngineering are committed to expanding K-12 engineering education nationwide and making it accessible to all. That’s why we practice “engineering on a shoestring”—making TeachEngineering free to access and use with lesson materials that are inexpensive, about $8 on average for a class of 25 students.
TeachEngineering couldn’t have gotten to this point without the support of the National Science Foundation, the CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science, an anonymous local foundation that supports this work—and the 56 engineering colleges that have contributed great classroom-tested K-12 engineering curriculum to the collection.
Now, thanks to our NAE partnership, we’re making it easier for every teacher in the country to use engineering to make science and math come alive for youth in all grades K-12.
Jackie Sullivan is founding co-director of both CU Boulder’s Engineering Plus Program and the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program, which focuses on integrating hands-on engineering throughout grades K-16.