San Antonio District Lands Grant to Expand Engineering Education
A
grant of $37,000 from Raytheon allowed 25
teachers in the San Antonio Independent School District to attend a November 17
workshop to help them teach the Engineering is Elementary (EiE)
curriculum. The
teachers also received an EiE curriculum guide and a materials kit with
everything they need to implement engineering activities in their
elementary
school classrooms.
Museum
of Science, Boston created the EiE curriculum because curators there said they believed
that
engineering was one subject in most STEM (science, technology,
engineering and
math) programs that has received little attention.
The
curriculum explores engineering fields — everything from electrical and
mechanical to biomedical engineering — with activities tied to the
concepts
behind each field. The goal is to both have the students learn the
concepts and
become interested in engineering as a career.
The
curriculum includes storybooks with experiments that children as young
as 6 can
do to solve problems using a five-step engineering design process.
One of
the teachers from the San Antonio district will also attend an EiE
Teacher
Education Institute in Boston to acquire the skills to conduct similar
workshops
for other district teachers.
"As a
large urban school district, we understand the importance of providing
our
teachers with challenging instructional resources to engage our
students in
STEM career fields," said Becky Landa, director of science and
curriculum
management for the San Antonio district. "An early pathway to increase
STEM
literacy is critical."
The San
Antonio grant is part of a larger $2-million Raytheon initiative
launched in
2011 to improve STEM education throughout the nation by expanding the
use of
the EiE curriculum. San Antonio is one of four districts this year and
17 since
2013 to receive the Raytheon grants.
"Our
nation's competitiveness and economic growth depend on development of
technical
talent, and teachers are vital to this effort," said Jack Harrington,
vice
president of cybersecurity and special missions at Raytheon.
The Museum of
Science, Boston also
spent $200,000 earlier this month to help elementary school
teachers integrate
engineering into their classroom instruction. The EiE curriculum was
developed
at the museum's National
Center for Technological Literacy.
"With
the release of the Next Generation Science Standards in 2013, there's a
new
expectation that engineering will be integrated with existing
elementary
science curricula, and schools and districts need an effective way to
do that,"
said Museum of
Science, Boston Vice President Christine Cunningham, who founded EiE.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.