This page, Conjectures, is full of our thoughts and assertions that have been developed over years of engineering educational outreach with elementary and middle school students. We must emphasize that this is a work in progress. There are three broad sections to our conjectures: Engineering Practices and Activities, Engineering Notebooks, and Classroom Practices. However, there is overlap between all three categories and we encourage you to explore all of the conjectures. We hope you use this page as a guide to your thinking about engineering and engineering notebooks in the classroom. Build on, question, and challenge our conjectures! Feel free to comment on this page, or email us more thoughts at stompnotebooks@gmail.com.
Engineering Practices and Activities
Long-term/recurring clients are are exciting for many students and offer important context and authenticity. Find a plethora of ways to engage students with the client.
There is some evidence that building = engineering in students’ minds, even though this isn’t the case. In order to help teach students that engineering is more than just building, integrate other aspects of engineering into the curriculum in meaningful ways. Rather than having ideation only at the start of each day and optional in some cases, or even as just a standalone activity, make sure that students are interacting with these concepts in important and relevant ways multiple times in a semester. Notebooks lend themselves to keeping track of a lot of these skills, and encouraging students to continue to develop them.
Generally, in order to make planning actually useful to students, activities should be complex and have constraints. A simple activity has its own uses, but planning probably will feel tedious for the students. Planning is also useful when students have to use classmate’s plans and procedures when creating engineered solutions.
When students are free to completely pick their own ideas for projects, there are pros and cons. A pro is building self-efficacy and agency over the project. However, students may come up with ideas that are not readily “buildable” in a classroom setting. In order to strike a balance, try asking students to self-evaluate the feasibility of creating some of their designs, practice feedback, and practice narrowing the scope of projects.
Ideation in engineering design should not be taken for granted and should be taught and scaffolded into a curriculum at varying scales (individual, whole class, pair, small groups). Encourage students to hear the ideas of other learners and build with them. A public/communal forum for ideas is expected.
Communication leads to equitable participation, which supports engineering design.
Engineering Notebooks
Engineering notebooks create opportunities for narrative based curricula and authentic engineering experiences.
Notebooks lend themselves to long-term activities that span across multiple sessions/class periods.
When students share projects, it holds them accountable to their peers. Notebook planning and feedback then becomes important part of forming student understanding of what is important in engineering.
Different check-ins via engineering notebooks are all useful and serve different roles. There could be bigger, programmatic check-ins about the outreach program, used at midpoints throughout semesters/years (in a multi-session outreach program) to see how learners experience the program generally. There could also be check-ins about the session that just happened, as well as check-ins about a longer project that just ended. Different flavors of reflection could include: more personal reflections (how are you feeling?), design reflections (what would you have changed if you had more time?), and general reflections (what do you like/dislike about STOMP?).
There are some distinct goals engineering notebooks can support, and these goals can be targeted individually or synergistically:
- Documenting/Planning
- Reflecting
- Highlighting: Using notebooks to highlight a person or engineer! This could be facilitators, this could be an engineer worth talking about (be purposefully diverse in the people you choose!), this could be other learners in the class
- Conveying content: Using notebooks to teach science or engineering concepts that are relevant to the day. This could mean pasting in graphics, using translations for vocab to students who don’t speak English, or writing out components of the engineering design process
Classroom Practices
Avoid activities that create rigid roles for students, i.e. having one student be a “recorder” and one be a “builder.”
Anything worth teaching should never be said once. Repeat! Remind!
STOMP Notebooks 