Solving Environmental Problems through Engineering

Rationale and School Demographics

The content of this unit is designed to be used in alignment with the engineering standards of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The NGSS were adopted by the state of Illinois for use in science education in 2014. Since that time, science instruction is becoming more commonplace within my school, Tarkington School of Excellence, however one area still falling short is students’ engagement in engineering.  Tarkington is a Title I school located on the southwest side of Chicago, Illinois. Tarkington serves the community as a public neighborhood school and as a training site for preservice teachers in the Academy of Urban School Leadership. It is made up of approximately 1,000 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, and 93% of its students are considered low income. The demographics that make up the student body are approximately 77% Hispanic and 22% Black students. This unit was designed to be delivered to an eighth-grade student body made up of 115 students. Of the 115 students, 15% receive Special Education services and 23% are English Language Learners.

As of the 2019-2020 school year, Tarkington School of Excellence required kindergarten through fifth-grade classes to teach Science weekly. This was a change from previous school years in which Science was only recommended to be taught weekly in those grade levels. Students begin taking Science as a core content class beginning in sixth grade when they receive daily science instruction. In middle school, there are approximately 40 weeks in the school year and science teachers only spend three to four weeks total engaging students in engineering experiences. “Engineering can be a meaningful way to engage students’ wide range of prior experiences in STEM, helping open the field to be more culturally relevant and meaningful to young learners. It can give students opportunities to deepen their science knowledge by engaging in problem-solving around locally-relevant issues.”⁸ Engineers solve problems and design devices and infrastructure. It is important to expose students to engineering since it will deepen their critical thinking skills and allow them to apply the science content they learn over the course of the year to new applications. This unit can integrate many different scientific concepts from any area of science, depending on what an educator would like it to complement in their course of teaching. The content of this unit could be easily adapted for any middle grade level, and it has enough content that could make it relevant to any strand of science education.