Chris Rogers: Teaching Engineering with a Camera and a Brick or Two

What is engineering?

• How to frame problems-
  
• Figuring out what they want to solve
  
• Building a path to a solution;
  

 To build this path, they have to know something about:

• Arts
  
• Science
  
• Budgets
  
• Constraints
  

Importance of Failure and Iteration

Once they go down that path, realizing they are going to fail, and learning how to re-align that path so they will ultimately succeed.
Students need to learn the  importance of iteration, not only on the sports field but in class as well; So a big part of our work is how to teach failure.

Measuring success by the diversity of solutions

Instead of everyone getting the right answer, we measure our success by the diversity of answers that we get. A highly successful class means everyone has a different solution- so instead of everyone having my mental model, I have to learn from their mental models; learning that working  and learning from others is collaboration, not cheating

Learning to Argue and defend mental models

Teachers should mostly be listening to students, not telling their students, listening to their mental models, not telling them theirs- having them validate those mental models by arguing. This can be done not only student-to-teacher, but student to student- SAM animation; share on Youtube—how you report your models changes everything.

Goals of Education

• Teaching kids how to be curious- why?
  
• Teaching kids how to learn on their own- passion for finding answers
  
• How do you test whether that knowledge is correct( reflection) and can be transferred to other situations
  
• Self-confidence( mindset)
  

Learning to Engineer

What causes kids to stop following directions and start engineering?
What in the classroom causes kids to stop engineering and start following directions?
Classrooms should be active building, not passive listening

Many Ways to Learn

There is no one way to teach science and engineering
We want education to be based on science about how people learn, not hunches
Teaching can be done in many different ways- lecturing, building, IR camera
Expeditionary Learning- integrated learning

Building; hammers, Lego—Silly Walks- having a diversity of solutions

Have distributed expertise across the classroom- building, programming
Do authentic problems that you, the teacher, don’t know the answer to