Category Archives: K-12

About or related to primary (k-12) science and engineering education. Likely of interest to teachers and administrators. Teachers may also find many of the posts we feel are of interests to students interested in science and engineering useful.

Yale Cultivates Young Scientists

Yale Science and Engineering Association (YSEA), Outreach programs cultivate young scientists:

Since 1989, YSEA has funded high-school science fair awards all over the world; in 2006, 241 outstanding high school students were awarded YSEA medals. By getting the Yale name into the public consciousness, YSEA hopes to draw high school applicants who intend to major in the sciences.
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For New Haven high school students, the New Haven Science Fair Program pairs them up with Yale graduate students for one-on-one mentorships. The students select a field that interests them, then develop an in-depth science fair project that teaches them about the scientific process. It’s an enjoyable introduction to the world of science research, and in early March, the students got the opportunity to show off what they’d learned in the yearly science fair, held in Commons.

Schoolgirls Find Vitamin C is Missing

Schoolgirls rumble Ribena vitamin claims:

“We thought we were doing it wrong. We thought we must have made a mistake,” Anna told New Zealand’s Weekend Herald. The girls were both 14 and students at Pakuranga College in Auckland when they did the experiment in 2004. Given Ribena’s advertising claims that “the blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges”, they were astonished and wrote to the manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). When they got no response, they phoned the company, but were given short shrift. “They didn’t even really answer our questions. They just said it’s the blackcurrants that have it, then they hung up,” Jenny said.

But then the girls’ claims were picked up by a TV consumer affairs programme, Fair Go, which suggested they take their findings to the commerce commission, a government watchdog. GSK said the girls had tested the wrong product, and it was concentrated syrup which had four times the vitamin C of oranges. But when the commerce commission investigated, it found that although blackcurrants have more vitamin C than oranges, the same was not true of Ribena. It also said ready-to-drink Ribena contained no detectable level of vitamin C.

GSK is in court in Auckland today facing 15 charges relating to misleading advertising, risking fines of up to NZ$3m (Â£1.1m). In Australia, GSK has admitted that its claims about Ribena may have misled consumers.

Open Access Science Education Journal

Science in School is an open access journal focused on science education published quarterly.

Science in School aims to promote inspiring science teaching by encouraging communication between teachers, scientists, science teachers and everyone else involved in European science education. Science in School addresses science teaching both across Europe and across disciplines: highlighting the best in teaching and cutting-edge research. It covers not only biology, physics and chemistry, but also maths, earth sciences, engineering and medicine, focusing on interdisciplinary work.

The contents include teaching materials; cutting-edge science; education projects; interviews with young scientists and inspiring teachers; European education news; reviews of books and other resources; and European events for teachers.

The latest issue includes: Silky, stretchy and stronger than steel by Giovanna Cicognani and Montserrat Capellas (on spider silk), A fresh look at light: build your own spectrometer by Mark Tiele Westra, Fair enough? Balanced considerations for future science-fair organisers by Eva Amsen and Fusion in the Universe: we are all stardust by Henri Boffin and Douglas Pierce-Price.

Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds

Design Squad Activity page:

Unleash your kids’ ingenuity and get them thinking like engineers with these 10 DESIGN SQUAD challenges. Designed for 9-12 year olds, each challenge has step-by-step instructions and age-appropriate explanations of the main idea.

NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials

NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials is offering short courses this summer, one at Northwestern and one at UCLA. NSF fellowships are available to professors, high-school science teachers, post-docs and Ph.D. candidates from US universities. The fellowship consists of full tuition plus a travel allowance, if applicable. Apply by April 1, 2007. I really like that the NSF provides funds to help people attend this type of thing.

The objectives of the NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials are:

* To identify and promote important areas of nanotechnology, and to create new areas o focus which will augment current nanotechnology research and development by universities, industries and government.
* To train future and practicing engineers, scientists and educators in the emerging areas of nanotechnology, nano-mechanics, and nano-materials.
* To exchange new ideas, disseminate knowledge and provide valuable networking opportunities for researchers and leaders in the field.

The short courses offered by the Institute provide fundamentals and recent new developments in selected areas of nanotechnology. The material is presented at a level accessible to BS graduates of science and engineering programs. Emphasis is on techniques and theory recently developed that are not available in texts or standard university courses.

Editorial: Engineers of the Future

Engineers of the future:

Technology education programs at all grade levels seek to afford students opportunities to tinker, to discover how things work, and to explore the designed world. At the elementary school level, students may learn about simple machines designed for specific tasks or about the basics of electricity by actually building simple circuits. In middle school, students may explore concepts in more detail, perhaps by designing and building a model of a bridge or a gliding aircraft. In high school, students may have opportunities to design an affordable home, take something apart to see how it works, or design and build a robot that would be used for a rescue mission or some other specific purpose. All of these experiences are related to the processes of engineering.

This is the type of learning that can enhance a future engineer’s experience, but also the type that cannot be included in the typical upper grade level math or science classroom for one main reason: math and science teachers generally do not have the time and may not have the interest or expertise needed for in-depth study of technology.

The editorial makes a good point. As import and primary science and math education are they are not enough. Effort to create an environment where students can experiment and use their hands and minds to solve problems is incredibly valuable. Teaching in this way is not as simple as it might seem, see example below for some ideas and resources that can help create these type of learning institutions.

Examples: Middle School Engineers – k-12 Engineering Education – Engineering is Elementary – Colorado Science Teacher of the Year – Building minds by building robots – Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology – Engineering Education Program for k-12 – Project Lead The Way – k-12 science and engineering posts

Asimo Robot: Running and Climbing Stairs

ASIMO Brings Engineering to Life at the Dream Factory:

The Dream Factory is an educational initiative organized by Honda of the UK Manufacturing Ltd (HUM) in association with The Science Museum to provide inspiration and a greater excitement about the subject of engineering. Aimed at Key Stage 3 students (ages 11-13 years), each workshop has been specifically designed to explain a basic engineering principle and show how this is then used in Honda’s leading edge technology. ASIMO joins Punk Science presenters from Discovery Channel’s Scientific Show and the HUM team to help inspire over 500 local school children.

Iowa Grapples with Engineer Shortage

State grapples with engineer shortage:

“In the past four years or so, it’s become increasingly difficult to fill positions, especially for people who have experience and can come in with a good skill set,” Dougherty said. “In some instances, you simply go without filling those jobs for a long time.”

Loren Zachary, an assistant dean at the ISU College of Engineering, said enrollment has been mostly in a downward trend over the past six years. In 2001, the college had 1,556 new freshmen; in the fall of 2006, freshman enrollment was 1,213, which was up slightly from 2005’s enrollment of 1,155. Of the 800 or so students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from ISU each year, more than 60 percent leave the state for employment, according to Hanneman’s figures.

“Certainly you have a lot of engineering students who are leaving the state,” said the IES’s Scott. “You’ll always have that because the universities attract many out-of-state students.” Zachary said ISU has only a small number of engineering students who are women or minorities. For the current academic year, 14.5 percent of undergraduate engineering students are female. These are two demographics the university is targeting to boost enrollment. “We need more females in engineering,” Zachary said. “It’s an untapped market for us.”

The article mentions several programs for primary and secondary school students we have mentioned previously: Project Lead the Way, Math Counts and FIRST LEGO League

More Lego Learning

Let Go of My Legos:

The eighth-grade Physics by Design class at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., has a reputation for being downright fun. But most students don’t refer to it by its conventional title, they just call it Lego. That’s right. Lego. You won’t find students here nodding off to sterile terms in a textbook; instead, they’re elbow-deep in bins of colorful plastic bricks building cars and movable robotic arms. And because they’re learning to program whatever they build with the help of Robolab software and a microcomputer embedded in a Lego brick, they really understand the meaning of torque, velocity and momentum.

Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.

NSF’s K-12 Math and Science Partnerships

NSF’s Math and Science Partnerships Demonstrate Continued Increases in Student Proficiency:

NSF’s MSP program supports partnerships among higher education, local K-12 school systems, and supporting stakeholders, such as businesses or informal science-education organizations. At a minimum, each partnership must contain one institution of higher education and one K-12 school system. The program’s portfolio includes 52 partnerships and more than 30 other projects engaged in the development of tools, research and capacity building for evaluation to support the work of the partnerships.
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An analysis of 123 schools participating in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program shows improvements in student proficiency in mathematics and science at the elementary, middle- and high-school levels over a 3-year period.