THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 9(3), 299–327
Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Engineering Competitions in the Middle School Classroom: Key Elements in Developing Effective Design Challenges
Philip M. Sadler
Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard Graduate School of Education
Harold P. Coyle
Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Marc Schwartz
Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard Graduate School of Education
Engineering challenges that involve both the design and building of devices that satisfy constraints are increasingly employed in precollege science courses. We have experimented with exercises that are distinguished from those employed with elite stu- dents by reducing competition and increasing cooperation through the use of tests against nature, large dynamic ranges in performance, initial prototype designs, and alternative methods of recording and presenting results. We find that formulating easily understood goals helps engage students in fascinatingly creative processes that expose the need for a scientific methodology. Such challenges engage male and female students equally, helping to erase the gender disparity in familiarity with the technology and skills common to physical science.
DESIGN CHALLENGES
Over the last 4 years, our team of teachers, developers, and graduate students at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, with National Science Foundation funding, has experimented with conducting engineering projects in nine local and six national schools. Children in Grades 5 through 9 have been challenged to design and build working devices as a major component of their physical science or tech- nology courses. We feel we have made progress in developing challenges that engage the knowledge, skills, and interests of middle school students.
These activities, positioned midway between free-play and structured laboratory experiments, offer a unique opportunity for students to acquire science pro- cess skills and learn physical science concepts. While inspired by design contests for elite students, we experimented with their redesign so that they more produc- tively engage students and lower barriers to entry for those without prior experi- ence in such activities.
Design Challenges in Education
Design contests evolved as a popular and highly publicized component of introductory engineering courses at top-flight engineering schools (David & Willenbrock, 1988).1 These student projects help to propel “students into open-ended, science-based problem-solving situations” (Samuel, 1986, p. 218). Within the technology and science education literature, professors and teachers report high levels of student enthusiasm for these competitions. However, few studies critically examine the effect of participating in these challenges within the cognitive or affective domains. Contrary to the prevalent belief that winning devices require student application of scientific principles, competitors rarely utilize theoretical knowledge in their designs, preferring strategic innovations that often circumvent the contest goals (Miller, 1995). For example, in one-on-one contests, a student may win only because his device interferes with the operation of the competing device.
The popularity of college design contests has had an impact at lower levels. High school physics teachers, in particular, have experimented with engineering challenges in their classes and in national competitions.2 Most of these efforts involve the time-constrained construction of a working device designed to solve some imagined problem. Most use a variety of construction materials and allow only a single competitive test after weeks of building. Other forms of design challenges engage students in problems for which no working model is ever constructed or tested, only the theoretical design is evaluated.
1Including the University of Melbourne, Colorado School of Mines, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
2Among these are the Junior Engineering Technical Society, Duracell Scholarship Competition, Physics Olympiad, National Science Olympiad, MESA (Mathematics–Engineer–Science–Achieve- ment) Day at Arizona State University, Middle- School First Design Competitions, and NASA’s Space Shuttle Involvement Project.
Over the last decade, technology teachers have shifted from teaching job-specific skills (e.g., type case sorting, welding, automotive repair) to pursuing more abstract underlying technological or scientific concepts so that relevant skills and knowledge can be used in new contexts (Perkins & Salomon, 1988). Creating such generalizable curricula has been recognized as the most significant problem facing technology education (Wicklein, 1993). Design challenges provide opportunities to practice transferring new understandings to new situations. Design projects within these courses are usually complex affairs with long periods of time spent in construction. Multiple goals and scoring rubrics determine the degree to which student designs satisfy constraints. These challenges emphasize designing and communicating solutions to complex problems, but are rarely optimized to reveal the underlying scientific principles.
National curriculum efforts have sought to merge science and technology by using: mathematics to find patterns in data through graphs and calculations, topics relevant to the world of the student, and technologies placed in the context of their historical and cultural development as solutions to human problems.3 Recently, re- searchers have utilized a variety of approaches to investigate the impact of such activities at the precollege level. Four examples are
1. Schools of Thought program at Vanderbilt. This curriculum is characterized by “sustained thinking about authentic problems” such as writing a feasibility study for a Mission to Mars.4 Students build domain-specific knowledge though extensive research on the World Wide Web and through group reflection and assessment.
2. Houses in the Desert, a 10-day culminating design project in the KIE/WISE (Knowledge Integration Environment/Web-Based Integrated Science Environ- ment) curriculum that has students apply learned concepts to a new situation.5 Students collect evidence from the web and other sources, and complete worksheets that help them utilize the principles of heat flow.
3. Kids Interactive Design Studio, which allows students to construct their own video games and play them (Kafai, 1996).
4. Learning By Design (LBD), a collection of open-ended project units that aid middle school students in exploring science concepts.6 Learners build working devices while taking time out for activities that teach physical science concepts.
3For example, the National Science Foundation funding of Man-Made World, the product of the En- gineering Concepts Curriculum Project; Technology for Science at the Technical Education Research Center, Cambridge, MA; Society of Automotive Engineers’ All Systems Go at the Education Develop- ment Center; and T/S/M at Virginia Tech.
4Available: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/ctrs/ltc/Research/schools_for_thought.html
5Available: http://kie.berkeley.edu/KIE/curriculum/summaryHITD.html
6Available: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/edutech/projects/projects.html
The first two projects utilize scenarios that present a problem to be solved by col- lecting and organizing information. The students, with the aid of their teacher, deter- mine the quality of the solution. Students do not actually build working devices or models as they draw on scientific principles and reasoning. In Kids Interactive Design Studio, 16 fourth-grade students were studied as they each designed and built functioning computer games. No overall measure of the quality of the resulting games or any assessment of the discovery of programming or science principles was made. LBD utilizes design challenges as a long-term “backbone” activity, which students revisit to improve, applying science principles learned from other activi- ties. Our team has used design challenges in a different fashion. Our challenges are the primary activity that students undertake, discovering both science concepts and honing skills from iterative attempts to build better performing devices.
Why Engineering Challenges in Middle School?
We have attempted to build on prior efforts to increase process skills, build content knowledge, and expose children to the possibility of careers in science and technology through a range of related activities. In interviews with scientists, technicians, and engineers, many relate youthful, extracurricular experiences that involve tinkering and experimentation with technology (e.g., building a crystal radio, putter- ing with an engine, repairing a toaster, or planning and building a sports-related device; Woolnough, 1994). At the middle school level, girls and boys express almost equal interest in science, medicine, and engineering as future careers (Cummings & Taebel, 1980).7 There is evidence that girls peak in their consideration of the occupations that they consider appropriate during middle school and that their views be- come more restrictive afterward.
As most young women pass through school, they come to believe that science and technology have little to do with their future and thus, take fewer science courses, opting out more quickly than male students (Warren, 1990). Surprisingly, a woman’s choice of a technological career too often begins when she is treated as though she cannot secure a role in any technological endeavor, despite her interest (McMillan, 1991). Female students begin to lag behind male students in physics, chemistry, and earth science achievement by eighth grade (Beaton et al., 1996), just as youngsters’ concrete experiences are becoming generalized into scientific concepts. Lack of exposure to design and use of manual skills may be an impedi- ment for many students, especially girls, because these skills are typically experi- enced outside of school. Taking time to develop these skills within school can help to close the gap for those without such opportunities and makes science accessible for all students. For example, British high schools have attempted to remedy this problem by promoting design competitions (50,000 students participated in 1993) titled CREeativity in Science and Technology (CREST). One of the most intrigu- ing results of these increasingly popular contests is that female students win over half of the awards at the beginner’s level (Woolnough, 1994). These challenges are supported by industry, with engineers often visiting participating schools.
International comparison data have shown that U.S. students have a high degree of mastery at factual levels of scientific knowledge (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1988). American students lag in higher level thinking in science, including the analysis and integration of experi- mental results. Although “hands-on” activities are touted as a way to improve these abilities, the power of these experiences is severely limited when used only to reinforce known facts and concepts. When the teacher knows the result of every activity and experiment beforehand, the prime motivating force for the student to exercise originality and explore many options in completing the activity is absent (Cohen & Harper, 1991).
We view design projects as helping to show the connections between science concepts and solutions to real world problems. Making the right connections should result in better solutions. Applying the wrong ideas in a design does not just result in a lower grade; it means that a device will work less well than employing more applicable ideas—you cannot just talk your way around it. Failure stares you in the face. Testing is essential to finding which ideas apply, because the real world does not always conform to the idealizations we use and teach in science (West, Flowers, & Gilmore, 1990). For engineering and science, the world is the final arbiter, not the teacher or any other authority. Design projects also help students to develop manual skills; not all students will go on to college, and even those who do will have to cope with items that may not work well for their designed purpose. Engineering projects not only help students learn to be good at building things, but what the building of things entails. Technical careerists and consumers alike benefit from understanding that every product has been designed, tested, and manufactured by someone.
Relevant Research
All learners come to the science topics they study with preconceptions. The process of learning science means, for most, discovering weaknesses in what we believe and reconstructing our ideas or taking on a new set of beliefs that are more fruitful (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982). Engaging students in experiences that challenge their ideas is critical in the process of change (Driver, 1973). These cog- nitive shifts from one conceptual framework to another can be compared to the “paradigm shifts” seen throughout the history of science (Kuhn, 1970). Design challenges allow students to test their preconceptions, permitting students to identify which ideas work better than others do. Especially useful are challenges that promote multiple solutions to a problem. Each can be evaluated by how well it satisfies constraints.
There are several aspects of the design process that are relevant to teaching science (Roth, 1998):
1. Design problems bring to the science classroom aspects of compelling real world applications.
2. Design is a form of cognitive modeling that crystallizes a conceptual model into a physical embodiment, either on paper or as a physical entity.
3. Design, especially iterative design, demands change. Alternatives are gen- erated and assessed. Reflection on a particular embodiment and its perfor- mance is necessary to create the next iteration (Schön, 1983).
4. Design requires the combination of many kinds of knowledge, including facts, concepts, and skills—often exposing knowledge that resists formalization.
Among middle schoolers, a wide developmental range can often be observed in the same classroom. Skill Theory is useful in parsing cognitive development into four tiers of increasing complexity: reflex, sensorimotor actions, representations, and abstractions (Fischer & Lamborn, 1989). Adolescents can operate at all four of these levels, from dropping a “hot” electromagnet, trying to wrap coils as “neatly” as possible, to drawing their different designs on a storyboard, and on to describing and conducting a controlled experiment to provide convincing proof of their ideas. The distinction between working at a lower level without support versus working at a higher level with support marks the boundaries of a student’s “developmental range” (Fischer, Bullock, Rotenberg, & Raga, 1993). Our view is that by effectively scaffolding and supporting students at each of these levels, we will see substantial gains in conceptual understanding and in process skills......"
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