K-12 Engineering Outreach: Design Decisions, Rationales, and Applications

vs. Contextualized Representations During our initial team discussions, the engineering subject matter expert (SME) brought to our attention the fact that engineering textbooks at the college level typically represent engineering content in abstract form, that is, with generic symbols (Moore, Miller, Lesh, Stohlmann, & Kim, 2013; Nathan et al., 2013). The rest of the team was surprised to learn this, and thought that K-12 students are typically not familiar with these abstract symbols. However, they are familiar with everyday electrical devices, such as smartphones. The teachers on the design team confirmed that students in elementary schools are not formally introduced to abstract symbols (e.g., standard scientific conventions) during science instruction at school. The students might learn conceptual basics of elementary engineering concepts (e.g., electricity) but are not taught any corresponding abstract symbols. The teachers suggested that students in the lower elementary grades might learn better if the instructional examples are concrete as students are developmentally not at the level of abstract thinking and acquiring knowledge from abstract examples. The engineering expert on the team, who had experience teaching more advanced engineering learners, proposed to integrate the abstract content representation in order to avoid formation of any misunderstandings and misrepresentations that might negatively impact future learning. Misconceptions that are created during initial learning might be difficult to repair later. The design team had therefore to empirically investigate which of the content representations would be most suitable for the intended target audience. FIGURE 12. Cord case and design.