In September, our founder and director, Christine Cunningham, was invited to participate in “Cracking the Code: The Next Generation of Women in STEM”, hosted by AtlanticLIVE. Alongside other STEM education researchers, corporate leaders, and prolific children’s book author Andrea Beatty, Christine participated in discussions that aimed to answer the question: how do you get more girls and women interested in STEM fields? Christine first noticed the trend of capable women and girls dropping out of STEM fields when her female classmates began disappearing from science classes. She has dedicated her career to battling the misconceptions and stereotypes that keep underrepresented populations out of STEM. Over the course of the day-long event, she shared valuable insights into the lack of female representation in science and engineering that she’s gained over more than a decade at the helm of EiE.

Our team is always looking for more ways to support elementary teachers. We listen closely to teachers, and we hear them express their need for financial support to underwrite the costs of professional development and materials. We are so pleased to have a partner in MathWorks, the Natick-based software company that is funding professional development opportunities for Massachusetts educators for the second year in a row. This year, the EiE/MathWorks scholarship program is bringing engineering to Haverhill Public Schools.

Football season is in full swing and the EiE staff is excited to root for their favorite teams—and to toss around the personalized football that we were happy to receive from our friends at Colorado STEMworks! If the middle schoolers in your afterschool program also have football fever, we have a timely engineering activity for you to implement. Our Engineering Everywhere unit Put a Lid On It: Engineering Safety Helmets introduces youth to the field of biomechanical engineering—a field of engineering that combines mechanical engineering and biology—as they explore the design and construction of helmets. We’ve found that youth are most engaged with engineering when they’re working on problems that connect to their own lives, and Put a Lid On It is the perfect opportunity to engage your kids with compelling real-world connections to football—one of the most popular sports in the United States.

The EiE team creates every curriculum unit using extensive feedback from our closest collaborators: educators! Each unit undergoes multiple rounds of pilot testing to ensure that educators can implement engineering with ease and students can have a rich learning experience. Our quality control doesn’t stop at the educator guide—we make sure every pipe cleaner bends just right, and that our smiley-face erasers aren’t too distracting for preschoolers. We carefully select and test each material so that by the time an EiE kit arrives in an educator’s classroom, they can feel confident that it works! This fall, we’re piloting units from our preschool, kindergarten, and afterschool curricula, supplemental curriculum materials, and digital storybooks. EiE staff are assembling 81 pilot kits by hand to send to sites across the country. To give you an idea of just how many pom-poms and purple foam sheets that entails, we created an infographic breaking down what it takes to orchestrate a national EiE pilot.

One of EiE’s crowning achievements is our Professional Development (PD) program. Elementary educators who come into our workshops knowing almost nothing about engineering leave feeling like EiE experts. But as much as our PD staff would love to show every single teacher the best practices to implement EiE, they can’t be everywhere at once. So when a district or school needs to prepare many teachers to implement EiE and provide the long-term support they know their teachers need, they send their professional development providers to one of our Teacher Educator Institutes.