PBL: Finding What's Out There

The science teachers in my district have started looking at examples of engineering design challenges as part of some curriculum rewrites for our 9th grade science courses.  It has been a source of frustration that most of what we've found has, at best, minimal integration of science concepts with engineering challenges.  It turns out we were simply looking in the wrong places.

This week I explored online collections of units utilizing project-based learning.  Given most of my summer will be spent writing curriculum for my 9th grade class, I decided to use this opportunity to look for examples of engineering in project-based learning (PBL).  Since PBL, by definition, requires a broad scope, inquiry, and the application of higher-order thinking skills, I found numerous examples where engineering is truly integrated with science content.  For example, in a curricular unit titled Energy Efficient Housing from Teach Engineering, the goal of designing a house that relies on passive solar heating is used to guide the study of heat transfer.  This kind of approach is exactly what we've been looking for since it will make both the engineering and the science content relevant and meaningful to many of our students.

Regardless of the course I'm teaching, I try to make significant use of inquiry and hands-on learning in an effort to provide students opportunities to do science, not just to learn it.  Many of the examples of PBL I found fit well with that approach.  For example, the projectile motion project from High Tech High has students design and build their own ballistic launcher, then use it to explore principles of projectile motion.  A project like this one would be an excellent fit for my 12th grade physics course.  It has students design, build, and revise a product as well as conduct experiments to develop scientific knowledge (such as how the angle of a launch affects the range of a projectile) through experimentation and to use that knowledge to make predictions (what angle and initial velocity should be used to hit a target with the launcher).

For the project I'll be planning in this class, I want to select a topic that will support the 9th grade science curriculum rewrites I'm working on, which means I need an engineering design challenge that can be effectively integrated with the content covered in the course.  I'm planning to start with a popular challenge where students build balloon-powered gliders that will travel along a suspended string and use principles of PBL to integrate the challenge with instruction over Newton's Laws.  A good guiding question for this project would be "How can I build a balloon-powered glider which will cross the classroom the fastest?"