Teaching Engineering Design to Kindergarteners

Lesson Takeaways

What were your major takeaways from the article? What was your 'AHA' moment? Something unexpected?

Describe your personal thoughts and conclusions as they relate to the reading and your own personal experience (internship, school, life, etc.)

The final engineering lesson began with The Perfect Pet (Palatini and Whatley 2003), an amusing story about a girl trying very hard to persuade her parents to let her have a pet. Each of the pets that she suggests have different needs that her parents use as a reason not to get it, such as a horse needing a lot of space and a dog needing a lot of exer- cise. This sets up a discussion with the children about a pet hamster’s needs, allowing them to use what they learned earlier in the unit about how a hamster’s habitat needs to provide the hamster with food, water, shelter, and space. We also talk about how we want our habitats to be similar to a ham- ster’s natural habitat, and since hamsters are excellent diggers who like to make burrows with connected tunnels, we will make a habitat trail to allow the hamster to move through tunnels. While we are reviewing, we are at the same time setting up the engineering de- sign challenge of creating a habitat trail that would meet the hamster’s needs. To complete the engineering design challenge, students worked in pairs to make a plan for a habitat trail on an 11”×17” preprinted tem- plate with spaces marked for the be- ginning and end of their trail. We re- minded students that for a successful habitat trail, they needed to use 20 shapes, and their habitat trail needed to meet the hamster’s basic needs of food, water, and shelter, with “shelter” being thought of as ensuring a safe place for their hamster to rest.We also explained that the shapes could be placed next to each other or stacked, but in order for the hamster to travel through the habi- tat trail, the shapes must always be touching because any gaps between shapes would be the equivalent of a hole in the trail through which the hamster could escape. After a quick review of the different shapes that they tested in the previous lessons, the students started deciding together how many of each shape they would use to get to the total of 20 shapes.

As they had done in an earlier lesson in the unit, students used two-dimen- sional shapes to represent these basic needs (i.e., a blue circle as water, an orange square as food, and a green triangle as shelter), placing the shapes alongside the trail to in- dicate points where the hamsters can eat, drink, and sleep.

Conclusions

Providing kindergarteners with the opportunity to use science knowledge in an engineering design challenge was a great experience. We found that while on a field trip to a nature preserve, the students surprised the natu- ralists by correctly using the word “habitat” when talk- ing about animals and their homes. Later in the year, when working with their FOSS science kit and adding to their aquariums, one student remarked, “We’re adding their habitat,” showing that they had gained a deep and broad view of what a habitat is and how it functions in an ecosystem.

One concern that teachers have as they consider how to incorporate engineering into their early elementary class- rooms is time and resources. This unit provides teachers with a literacy and STEM unit that uses materials which are relatively inexpensive and/or often already available in many schools. For example, one classroom copy of each book is needed, along with photocopies and class sets of tangrams, and three-dimensional solid shapes.