Pictures from our Ed+gineering activities during the Fall 2022 Semester.
Collaboration 1
In November 2022, 4th grade students from Larchmont Elementary school visited ODU for Engineering Day! Elementary students toured engineering labs to learn about different aspects of engineering like manufacturing, robotics and biomechanics. After the lab tour, Education students taught the children about the problems with plastic pollution in the ocean using a lesson adapted from YES (Youth Engineering Solutions). The 4th graders were then presented with a model bay and challenged to design a filter that could trap plastic pollutants without endangering marine animals and wildlife and that would not interfere with marine economic and recreation activities like fishing and boating. The children learned that it can be challenging to design a solution to a problem that affects so many different groups! After the engineering lesson, students learned about college life by visiting Owen House (a residence hall) and checking out the Student Rec Center!
Collaboration 2
In Fall 2022, 16 education students in an educational technology class worked alongside 18 5th graders from Academy for Discovery from Lakewood School in an after-school technology club. With a club theme of mythology, the students set out to design and build a mini-golf course featuring Hercules 12 labors. Each team of two education students and two 5th graders collaborated to create a mini-golf hole with robotic elements that could challenge even the best putter! Using Hummingbird Bit robotics kits, the teams designed mechanisms and coded LEDs, motors, and sensors to generate a variety of gates and levers that guarded their holes, like Cerberus guarded the entrance to Hades! The children’s families were invited to play the course where they had to slay the Nemean lion and the Lernaean hydra, capture the Cretan bull, the mares of Diomedes, the Cerneian hind, and Cerberus, and then clean the stables of Augeas in order to complete the entire course!
Collaboration 3
On December 1, 2022 students from Dr. Gutierrez’s Elementary Science Methods course from Old Dominion University’s Darden College of Education and Professional Studies traveled to Southside STEM Academy at Campostella in Norfolk, VA to teach five 2nd grade classes an engineering lesson. This engineering lesson was a modified version of the Engineering Pumpkin Pollinators designed by YES (Youth Engineering Solutions) elementary lesson. Elementary education student teams connected the 2nd graders to literacy by reading a text from the YES lesson that conveyed the “problem” that students were going to help solve through engineering. Preservice teachers then moved students through the engineering design process to plan, design, build, and test hand pollinators that would be able to effectively transfer pollen to help the bees and assist in the process of pumpkin plant pollination.
