The opportunity for integration of engineering in K–12 settings has never been greater. Publication of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013 incorporated engineering design throughout all grades, providing an unprecedented opportunity for the engineering community to engage youth in the creative engineering design process beginning in kindergarten.
Fortunately, CU’s TeachEngineering digital library provides more than 1,350 consistent, high-quality standards-based engineering lessons and hands-on activities created for K–12 teachers to weave hands-on engineering design into their students’ science and math learning.
The collection is continually enriched with curriculum that builds meaningful connections between students’ lives and real-world engineering. To do so, TeachEngineering partners with faculty and teachers from dozens of National Science Foundation-funded K–12 engineering education programs in universities across the country. These partners test new curriculum in their local schools before it is published. A rigorous peer-review and editing process, coupled with continuous background collection curation, also ensures TeachEngineering is user friendly for teachers.
In 2014, TeachEngineering hand-aligned all of its lessons and hands-on activities to NGSS and Common Core Math standards, requiring augmentation of over 25 percent of the curricula. Incorporating user feedback and teacher testing to ensure intuitive navigation of the TeachEngineering curriculum, and to support the growing demand of its 1.9 million unique users in the past year, TeachEngineering recently launched a modernized version that highlights the NGSS and Common Core Math standard alignments. Check it out at www.teachengineering.org.