Happy National Engineers Week! This week on the blog, we're celebrating by highlighting our favorite engineering tool: the Engineering Design Process!

Imagine this scenario. Your students have worked carefully and enthusiastically to design a technology . . . only to discover that it doesn’t work as planned. When that sailboat doesn’t sail, or that model maglev train fails to levitate over the track, it’s a teachable moment. You want to be ready, not with answers, but with questions that help students do their own troubleshooting.

Education journalist Steven Hastings once calculated that a typical teacher asks 400 questions a day, or roughly one question a minute. That extrapolates to 70,000 questions a year, or 2 to 3 million questions over the course of a teaching career. But not all questions are created equal. Certain questioning strategies are particularly effective; here are four of our favorites.

Q: When my students work on an engineering design challenge, do they HAVE to do the "Improve" step? It takes extra time, and I feel like they've already learned what they need to know from their first designs.

A: Please don't skip the "Improve" step! That's when crucial learning happens.

If you’re interested in learning more about crosscurricular integration, we have a plethora of resources available on our website and in our blog. Here are a few resources to help you integrate engineering into other subject areas.

Your EiE Teacher Guide offers more than just lesson plans; it has teaching tips, assessment, and other useful extras. Did you know the EiE website is also packed with handy resources that help you teach elementary engineering? With our latest web redesign, these helpful teaching tools are more find-able than ever! Just click the “EiE Resources” tab and let us take you on a tour . . .

If you’ve ever called or emailed EiE, you’ve had the pleasure of speaking to our customer service team. Our customer service representatives have an encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of EiE, from big-picture ideas about unit implementation to the minutia of magnet sizes. They’re always happy to offer a helping hand and share their infinite wisdom—and today, we’re sharing some of it with you. Here are five of the most frequently asked EiE questions, according to the people who know all the answers!