Project Summary

This three-year Youth-Based program will provide 70 high school and middle school students of predominantly ethnic/racial minority status in the Somerville Public Schools with IT enrichment experiences in engineering. The project will: 1) engage these students in collaborative, cross-grade level teams who will compete in engineering design challenges grounded in the physics concepts of force and motion; 2) support these teams with technology-rich curricula; 3) produce multimedia profiles of student learning using cutting edge information technologies.

Each of five design teams will be led by an engineering or physics graduate student from Tufts University and will be based in one of Somerville's five K-8 schools. Each team will feature four high school students who will work alongside the Tufts student as mentors to ten middle school students. The work of the project will be divided into two related but separate year-long design challenges which will require a thorough understanding of force and motion, concepts which are integral to the Massachusetts state standards for middle school science. The students will integrate new technologies such as the SAM software into the design process as they solve the challenge. They will define problems, explore and assess alternative, weigh constraints, analyze designs, delegate responsibilities, define manufacturing parameters and test solutions.

Throughout the project, high school students will apprentice themselves to their Tufts team leader, revisiting their own understanding of the middle school curricula as they mentor their younger peers. As they shoulder increasing responsibility for facilitating the work of the design team, these older students will model exciting participation in scientific inquiry. The project's self-directed and exploratory learning will capture and sustain the intellectual imagination of all students who will find in their participation an opportunity to think and act like engineers. Periodically throughout the year-long design competition, teams will draw on the human and technological resources of Tufts scientists and engineers to strengthen and reinforce their understanding of the physics that underlies their engineering designs. Students will also use the VideoPaper Builder software to document and publish their work as annotated video project profiles which will be disseminated via the Internet as multimedia websites.

Student progress will be measured by assessing a broad range of skills, based on the Theory of Successful Intelligence (Sternberg 1985, 1997), which posits that intelligence comprises three types of abilities in addition to memory: analytical, practical, and creative abilities. The PACE Center will conduct pre- and post-tests at the start and end of each semester, collect and analyze some of the videos, and conduct periodic interviews with middle and high school students. The PIs will use this feedback to perform science education research on the learning of students.

Intellectual Merit : Extensive science education research (see Kavanagh & Sneider 2007 for a review) has shown that many misconceptions (regardless of learner's age and educational background) remain undisturbed by instruction. This project offers the cross-grade level collaborative design challenge as an innovative model for teaching engineering and physics. Through their cognitive apprenticeships (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the engineering students, all students will engage in the real-world work of professional physicists and engineers. In doing so, they will systematically confront and overcome gaps in their own understanding of science.

Broader Impacts: Apprenticeships like these teach students the habits of mind that engineers and physicists use when they reconcile the relationship of the empirical to the theoretical. At yearly meetings this project will demonstrate the validity of this model to a wider community of teachers, parents and scientists. The winning team will present their project at a conference.