Nancy Cianchetta is moving back and forth between adjoining lab rooms, where about a dozen fifth-to-seventh-graders seem oblivious to the made-to-order July weather outside. At benches, students chatter as they rig wind-powered winches, tweaking the angles of the vanes. Cianchetta, an Everett High School biology teacher, strides confidently through the patches of minor turbulence, expertly and almost casually dealing with questions and interruptions. A teaching assistant also provides support, if more tentatively, moving slowly among his fired-up charges.
Besides wind machines, Cianchetta has kids making batteries, constructing bridges of cardboard and old newspapers, and designing exploding toys. In this workshop, called “Building Better Contraptions,” and eight others, the DesignCamp at University of Massachusetts-Lowell presents kids with technological challenges ranging from building robots to fashioning clothes from recyclable materials, feeds them the essentials of engineering, and then lets them have at it.
DesignCamp is a hothouse for cultivating ways to bring engineering to the secondary-school classroom. The instructors–an all-star lineup of public school teachers, most of whom hold undergraduate science degrees–hope that the practical art of making things that work will not only help remedy the low achievement of American students in science and math, but also open up career doors for them.
“You’ve got to get rid of this ‘memorize and flush’ model–memorize this, take the test. How much do you ever remember?” says Doug Prime, founder and director of the DesignCamp and a UMass-Lowell engineering graduate who has taught in middle school. “We want kids to engage in problem solving.”
DesignCamp began in 2000 as three weeklong sessions for about 60 middle-school students. This year the camp enrolled about 300 fifth-to-10th-graders from the Lowell and Lawrence areas. There are no entry requirements, and tuition is $220, $380 for the two-week Flight School, a course in aerodynamics. About 60 campers receive financial assistance.
The camp’s sponsors include the state Department of Education, the Engineering in Massachusetts Colla-borative (EiMC), the Northeast Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire Regional School-to-Career Consortium, Boston University’s College of Engineering, the Women in Science and Engineering program at UMass-Lowell, Middlesex Community College, EMC Corp., Agilent Technologies, and Commonwealth Corp.
The student-teacher ratio at the camp is about 15 to 1, small enough to permit spirited inquiry without too much risk of chaos. One thing instructors would like to improve is the gender mix: Only about one-fifth of this summer’s campers are girls, who some educators say have much to gain from the experience.
“One of the things that’s been shown to correlate to students, especially girls, going on in science and feeling comfortable with it is familiarity with tools,” says instructor Diana Stiefbold, a sixth-grade science and social studies teacher from Sharon. The fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders in her Shipwreck Electronics workshop are getting familiar with soldering guns, voltage meters, and pliers as they build batteries, electromagnets, light bulbs, buzzers, and electric pencils. The junior Edisons will take home sufficient materials to rig their rooms with remote-control switches, dimmers, doorbells, and alarms.
Retooling the curriculum
The camp is one of several initiatives throughout the state aimed at making engineering a core subject in the public schools. In addition to kindling the interest of its students, DesignCamp is intended to yield lesson plans and activities to convey engineering principles in accordance with the state’s new science and technology/engineering curriculum framework.
The state Board of Education adopted its first science-and-technology curriculum framework in 1995, two years after the Education Reform Act of 1993 created the statewide curriculum requirements. Last December, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to designate engineering and design as required components of its public school curriculum.
Proponents of the expanded technology curriculum say engineering in the schools will serve both educational and economic purposes.
“Engineering offers a very good and effective way to introduce project- and problem-based learning into schools. It brings alive math and science, it helps people to think in three dimensions, and [it addresses] the shortage of engineers and technicians,” says Ioannis Miaoulis, dean of the engineering school at Tufts University and a member of the DOE Framework Advisory Board. “Engineering and basic technological literacy is no longer an extra, because almost everything we manipulate, work with, and get help from is the result of some engineering process.”
But state Education Commissioner David Driscoll admits that making schools more tech-savvy will be a challenge. “This is really a tall order. I mean, changing the curriculum in a fundamental way in science so that it includes engineering strands all the way up from elementary school is quite a change,” says Driscoll. “It fits very well with what we’re trying to accomplish with. . .standards-based reform–making the connection, getting kids actively involved in their learning. The problem is changing practice and curriculum that has been in place for years.”
Within schools, departmental turf wars and the zero-sum nature of curriculum changes threaten the new framework, according to Judah L. Schwartz, professor of education and co-director of the Educational Technology Center at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “The prognosis is not optimistic. It’s hard for schools, particularly high schools and middle schools, to move away from traditional rubrics,” he says.
In many ways, word of the new engineering framework is just getting out. This fall, the Department of Education is sponsoring forums for curriculum coordinators, administrators, and professional development trainers, and the Museum of Science will host a conference on the framework for teachers.
DOE also plans to post curriculum modules and examples online. Finally, the state’s Partnerships Advancing Learning of Mathematics and Science program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will collect and disseminate supporting materials. UMass-Lowell has received a state grant to instruct area teachers on framework topics, drawing heavily on DesignCamp materials for the effort.
“Realistically, it’s going to take two to three years to get a groundswell and get a critical mass of people understanding the shift,” Driscoll says. But it won’t be long before schools will be held accountable for results via MCAS. “Testing. . .will drive it pretty quickly,” says Driscoll.
Last spring, engineering-related questions were incorporated into the fifth-grade and eighth-grade MCAS science and technology tests. (One eighth-grade open-ended question: “Using parts of the Universal System Model, describe how a bicycle operates.”)
For high school, DOE will pilot a science and technology/engineering test next spring for ninth or 10th graders, and a separate engineering test could follow in a couple of years. The state is still working out the details of adding a year-long engineering elective that would be offered in ninth or 10th grade, as part of the standard high-school science sequence. A separate engineering MCAS test might eventually accompany that elective, according to a DOE spokesman.
The framework changes are not universally welcomed, particularly among those dubious about MCAS testing.
“There became a direct link between something in the framework and the ability to be tested on it, rather than an ability to understand it,” says Phil Veysey, director of education policy and programs for the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, the union representing teachers in numerous urban districts. “It’s this Board [of Education’s] determination that everything needs to be tested, which goes back to not trusting classroom teachers.”
Making math and science pay
The introduction of engineering content into the public-school curriculum comes at a time of increasing concern about math and science education. One closely watched performance measure, the Trends in Math and Science Study (TIMSS), is an international benchmark of eighth-graders’ proficiency in math and science, funded in this country by the US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. American performance was less than stellar among industrialized nations in 1995 and 1999. The 1999 TIMSS study also noted that American students are less likely than their international counterparts to be taught math and science by teachers who majored in those subjects in college, a qualification that the report correlates with student performance. American students at the low end of the socioeconomic ladder–many in urban, largely minority schools–had especially low scores.
On the state level, student performance on the MCAS math exam has been particularly troubling. In 2000, 42 percent of students who took the test statewide failed the 10th-grade math exam that, beginning with the class of 2003, students must pass in order to receive a high-school diploma. Among African-American students, 70 percent of those who took the test failed; among Hispanics, the failure rate was 73 percent. Results of last spring’s test are scheduled for release in October.
Poor performance in math and science places a roadblock between these students and some lucrative careers in technology. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September 2000 National Compensation Survey, the average hourly income, including wages and benefits, for all workers in the Boston, Worcester, and Lawrence areas was slightly over $19. But for engineers, architects, and surveyors, that figure topped $32 an hour, with pay for civil engineers and electrical engineers exceeding $30 and $36 an hour, respectively. Meanwhile industry, facing what it considers a shallow pool of qualified domestic workers, has been seeking help overseas, in the form of temporary workers holding H-1B visas. Krishna Vedula, dean of UMass-Lowell’s Francis College of Engineering and founder of the Engineering in Massachusetts Collaborative, thinks that the DesignCamp approach can make math and science more practical, and therefore more accessible to groups underrepresented in the technological world, such as minorities and women.
“Instead of forcing traditional academics on them, we need to engage them in interesting hands-on experiences which motivate them toward math, science, and communication skills,” says Vedula. Indeed, he’d like to see camps that are tailored specifically for girls and minority students. “We have observed that in the camps so far, the dynamics of the student interactions appears to somewhat inhibit the creativity of the women and underrepresented students,” he says.
Driscoll adds that the engineering push ought to bring alive traditional science topics while better equipping students for related academic and work pursuits. “Good physics, or good chemistry or biology, is always about making connections in the real world,” he says. “We want kids to be able to make those connections.”
In a darkened UMass-Lowell classroom, Katy, a seventh-grader at St. Margaret’s School in Lowell, inspects a light bulb that she’s made from a glass jar. She and her fellow castaways in DesignCamp’s Shipwreck Electronics Workshop have been tinkering with various lengths and diameters of copper wire, testing their effectiveness as filaments in their improvised light bulbs. Katy drops an Alka-Seltzer tablet into the jar.
“[This] takes out the oxygen, so it will light a little better and last a little longer,” she explains. After patiently connecting a filament to the lid, she calls for the power to be switched on. The jar glows red for an instant, but then the filament burns out, or perhaps slips its moorings.”I’m not sure. We’ll have to check that,” Katy mutters as she quickly rigs a replacement wire. This one, considerably longer than the first, burns brighter and stays in place.
Science is “kind of” her favorite subject, Katy says. That may be an indicator that DesignCamp is at least halfway toward its goal.
Ted Smalley Bowen is a freelance writer living in Boston.