Teaching Exercises

Young Inventors is a community STEM program put on each semester by the SUNY Oswego Technology Department. It is for children in 4th-6th grades and occurs once a week for four consecutive weeks. See the Oswego KidsTech website for more details.

During the Fall of 2017, as part of my Teaching Methods for Technology Education course (TED 306), one of my fellow students and I spearheaded the planning and instruction of Young Inventors.

In order to make the planning and instruction relevant to the Teaching Methods course, we treated the lessons we planned and executed as if they were a sequence of lessons that were to be part of an edTPA portfolio. As the nature of the program does not lend itself well to formal assessment of participants, we did not delve heavily into Task 3 of the edTPA ("Assessing Student Learning"), but we did draft responses to Tasks 1 and 2 of the edTPA ("Planning for Instruction and Assessment" and "Instructing and Engaging Students in Learning" respectively).

We chose the central focus for the four weekly sessions to be Transportation Systems, and then planned four lessons, each with accompanying problem solving activities. The four lessons are summarized on this page, and their topics included:

Aircraft and Systems
Watercraft and Transportation Systems
Landcraft and Subsystems
Intermodal Transportation Systems

Lesson 1: Aircraft and Systems

We began this session with two small lessons about the concepts of aircraft and systems. The problem solving activity associated with this lesson challenged participants to work in teams to transport six pennies as far as possible using paper airplanes. Participants built their solutions, tested them, and recorded the distances each solution flew. You can find our slides for this session here.

Lesson 2: Watercraft and Transportation Systems

This session began with two small lessons about watercraft and transportation systems in general. The lesson about transportation systems called back to the concept of systems from Lesson 1, drawing on participants' past learning. The problem solving activity associated with this activity asked participants to work as teams and use a set of prepared materials to assemble the fastest wind-powered water-vessel. You can find our slides for this session here.

Lesson 3: Landcraft and Subsystems

For this lesson, we began by going over the concepts of landcraft and subsystems (the concept of subsystems again drawing on participants' past learning). We then moved into a problem solving activity where participants were asked to work in teams and use prepared materials to construct rubber-band-powered vehicles and to experiment with different kinds of rubber bands and different numbers of windings. You can find our slides for this session here.

Lesson 4: Intermodal Transportation Systems

For this final lesson, we called back to all of the previous lessons in order to delve into the concept of intermodal transportation. We challenged the participants to work still in teams, but to communicate with other teams to transport two golf balls (some cargo) over water and over land. We provided participants with pre-fabricated rubber band cars and foam boats which are shown below. (The design and fabrication of the laser cut rubber band cars was my responsibility.) The problem solving undertaken by participants involved crafting a way to safely hold the golf balls on each vehicle without hindering the vehicles' mobility. You can find our slides for this session here.

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