“I Know Nothing About Engineering.” How Do I Get Started?

A middle school science teacher asked me this after a workshop, and she said it the way most teachers do, with a small apology attached, as if she were confessing to a gap she should have closed years ago.

The gap is real. It is just almost never the gap the teacher thinks it is. Teachers who ask this usually assume what they are missing is engineering content: statics, materials science, circuits, CAD. What is actually missing is a way to structure a design task so that students have to think their way through it instead of fiddling their way through it.

That is a design and facilitation problem, which means you can solve it, and you already have most of the tools. Here are eight keys.

1. Start from what you already teach. A Framework for K-12 Science Education combined science and engineering into a single set of practices, and the combination was not cosmetic. Constructing explanations and designing solutions is one practice. Asking questions and defining problems is one practice. Developing and using models, analyzing data, using mathematics, arguing from evidence: engineers do all of these constantly. You are already teaching most of the practices engineering requires. The difference is that you have been pointing them at a natural phenomenon rather than at a human problem.

2. Begin with a problem, not a build. Most of the engineering activities we inherited start with a build. Make the tallest tower. Keep the egg from breaking. Students can succeed at those by adjusting materials until something holds. A problem starts somewhere else: someone needs something, and the need is specific enough to describe. Lost Keys, a third grade challenge, opens with a video of a man who dropped his keys down a storm drain. Heat Packs for Cold Snaps, a middle school challenge, opens with footage of the 2021 San Antonio cold snap and the organizations that could not buy enough hand warmers for the sleeping kits they were assembling. Neither is a build, and you can see the difference in the first ten minutes.

3. Write the criteria and constraints down before anyone touches materials. Constraints are the have-to-haves. Criteria are the more-is-better dimensions that give students a direction for improvement and a way to compare two designs. In Lost Keys, the constraints are that the device fits in a glove box, fits through the holes in a grate, works in the dark, and works underwater. The criteria are lifting as much weight as possible, reaching as deep as possible, and being easy to use. Building that table with a class takes ten minutes, and it is the highest-return ten minutes in the lesson, because it converts “make something cool” into “meet these requirements and beat the other designs on these dimensions.”

4. Put the relevant science on the table before students design. Students cannot use ideas they do not have. Before third graders design a key retrieval device, they read and discuss three short texts: one on magnetism and gravity as forces that act without contact and can be balanced or unbalanced, one on systems and system models, and one on measuring mass and length. None of that requires an engineering degree. It is your content. What changes is where it sits in the lesson, showing up as a tool students will need rather than as the thing to learn for Friday.

5. Let students handle the materials before they design. A student who has never held a connector strip or a wood dowel cannot generate a viable idea with it, and groups that cannot generate viable ideas stall out and start guessing. Put a small amount of each consumable in a sample bag, hold up each tool, say what it is for, and review safe use. Ten minutes here prevents a lost class period later.

6. Make every student generate more than one concept, then choose systematically. Each student sketches a first concept, draws a model of how it works, and estimates what it will cost. Each then reviews two classmates’ concepts, checking specifically for constraint violations, which students commit constantly and by accident. Everyone revises and produces a second, different concept. A group of three now has six designs and ranks them against the criteria in a decision matrix. That is where trade-offs become visible and arguable, and where students meet a fact that is hard to accept at any age: the first idea is almost never the best one.

7. Build in more than one test. Build and test. Refine and test. Refine and test again. With one test, students learn that design is guessing and hoping. With three, and with records of what they changed and what happened, they learn that design is using data to improve something. This is also where measurement error, precision, and accuracy stop being vocabulary and become problems students have to solve.

8. Ask for an argument, not just a working prototype. The closing question is not “did it work.” It is “how do you know this is the best solution to this problem.” Students put up a claim, back it with evidence from their testing, justify why that evidence is the right evidence, and then other groups poke holes in it. This is where the science comes back, because a justification requires naming the idea that makes your evidence count.

Putting It All Together

None of this requires you to know engineering. It requires you to structure a task so that students cannot succeed without reasoning, and then to circulate and keep groups productively stuck rather than rescuing them.

The technique I use is small: two questions, a nudge, and a goal. “Would one of you tell me what you have been working on?” “Would anyone else like to add to that?” Then a hint calibrated to what you just heard, and a specific target to hit before you come back.

The two most useful nudges in a design challenge are “What are you trying to optimize, and why?” and “Why are you assuming that will work?” You do not need to know the answer to either one in order to ask it. That is the whole point.

How ADI Makes This Easier

The first five keys are the demanding part, because writing a real problem, identifying the criteria and constraints, writing the informational texts, and assembling a priced materials list is not something most of us have time to do from scratch.

That is the work the ADI STEM design challenges do for you, and the seven-stage model builds in the concept review, the decision matrix, the three build and test cycles, the argument session, and the report. If you want a first one to try, Lost Keys works well for elementary and Heat Packs for Cold Snaps works well for middle school. Neither requires you to know any engineering.

Want to Take a Look?

Browse the challenges and the Three-Dimensional STEM Challenges with Argument-Driven Inquiry books at shop.argumentdriveninquiry.com/collections/engineering-challenges, or learn more about ADI curriculum materials, the ADI Learning Hub, and our professional learning options at argumentdriveninquiry.com.