The National NSTA Conference on Science Education always provides attendees an opportunity to hear what is most pressing on people’s minds. Looking at session topics and hearing people’s conversations lend themselves to identifying key themes that cut across the nation and in the classroom. One of the themes I had encountered this year was the need to incorporate more engineering curriculum in our schools and to encourage students to major in engineering fields.

This certainly echoes what Dr. Mike Mooney, Assistant Professor at the Colorado School of Mines and one of our presenters in the April NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar, discussed in a recent paper he co-wrote in 2002 in support of teaching engineering:

“[M]any bright students, particularly women and minorities, choose not to pursue engineering careers. The Department of Labor projects 6 million new technology jobs by 2008, however the total number of mathematics, engineering, and physical science majors has been shrinking since the mid-1980’s.”

How can a teacher, already faced with demands in terms of state testing and other requirements address this? Mooney, and other proponents of engineering curriculum offer up the fact that engineering content readily incorporates the concepts and standards that need to be met in mathematics and science and does so in a way that lends itself to hands-on inquiry in the classroom.

Examples of lessons, activities, and entire curricular units such as those found in TeachEngineering provide teachers with resources that make it easier to introduce engineering concepts in a fun and educationally sound manner.

Students, myself included when I was growing up, often don’t have a sense of what an engineer actually does–discounting that they may have the skills and interests to become an engineer even before entering high school. TeachEngineering provides resources to help students understand the skills and tasks of an engineer, as does another excellent NSDL collection, The Fun Works Career Resource Center. As a side note, middle school students had a direct hand in developing the Funworks site in order to make it more useful and appealing to middle school teenage audiences.