The EiE classroom video collection offers a window into classrooms engaging in elementary engineering across the country. In these videos, you’ll see expert teaching techniques in action and hard-working student engineers, as well as short interviews with educators about their experience teaching EiE. Our hardworking video team is committed to filming every lesson of each unit in two different classrooms, so educators and researchers can gain a better understanding of what engineering really looks like in a wide variety of elementary classrooms. With the three latest additions to the classroom video collection, we are very close to reaching our goal of two sets of videos per unit! Read on to learn more about the newest videos, featuring Solid as a Rock: Replicating an Artifact, No Bones About It: Designing Knee Braces, and A Slick Solution: Cleaning an Oil Spill.

Did you know our curriculum team designed the EiE engineering curriculum to support literacy instruction? We created literacy resources, like our context-setting storybooks, to enhance our units and emphasize the importance of written communication. In honor of National Literacy Month, we wanted to share a few examples of how our curriculum supports literacy instruction and offer fun extension lessons that can help you incorporate creative writing into every EiE unit!

Teachers often tell us that kids gravitate towards engineering when they learn that engineers help people. EiE’s real-world connections are often focused on helping others, and that concept is well illustrated in our life-science engineering units. Introducing students to life-science engineering early on can set them up for success in a changing job market. Across the globe, careers in life-science sectors like biomedical engineering are experiencing rapid growth: the US Department of Labor projects that the demand for biomedical engineers will increase 23% by 2024. These five units can kick-start an interest in life-science engineering for your students, and show them how engineers can help countless people (and animals!).

At the start of a new school year, it may be tempting to dust off a tried-and-true STEM activity, like the egg drop or the spaghetti tower challenge. But this year, we challenge you to refresh your repertoire with our thoughtfully designed, classroom-tested curriculum. EiE units are fun and hands-on like your favorite STEM activities, and they provide students with an even richer learning experience by integrating with a variety of subject areas and offering real-world connections that introduce young learners to real engineering careers. Check out these four engineering activities that put a fresh twist on your old favorites!

When you first sit down with an EiE binder or materials kit, it can feel overwhelming. There are prep lessons, assessments, storybooks, diagrams, student journals, and a seemingly random assortment of craft materials—it’s easy to start jumping from item to item and get lost in the shuffle. We’ve heard that feedback before, and that’s why our video team set out to create a set of four short clips that help you dive in to our in-school curriculum. If you’re brand new to EiE, the 10 minutes you’ll spend watching this set of videos will save you tons of time in the long run. If you’re an EiE pro, you might learn something new . . . and they’re fun to watch, too!