Abstract
Regional growth in offshore wind energy development, changes to the state’s K-12 science standards, and a desire to deepen undergraduate student learning coalesced to inspire an interdisciplinary community engagement project bridging university courses in engineering and education. The project consists of three main activities: a professional development event for local fourth grade teachers, five classroom lessons designed and taught by undergraduate engineering and education majors, and a final celebration event, all focused around the topics of wind energy and engineering design. This spring, the project was carried out for the third consecutive year, though each year’s implementation has been unique due to the timing of the onset of COVID-19. Analysis of responses from the Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale and an end-of-semester course survey demonstrate growth in student learning and transferrable skills from participating in the semester-long project. Additionally, exploration of students’ narrative work provides a richness to further understanding their growth and challenges they confronted. This interdisciplinary community engagement project will continue into future years, with improvements informed by the findings of this work, most notably with the hope of returning to a fully in-person delivery of lessons to fourth-graders.
Highlights
The third year of our cross-disciplinary community engagement project, bridging college classes in engineering and education, was carried out in the Spring 2021 semester.Despite the continuity of this project from previous years, each implementation has been markedly different from all others, as the COVID pandemic disrupted the project midway through its second year and dramatically influenced the implementation of its delivery this past spring
This paper focuses on the learning outcomes for the college students, at least anecdotally the fourth graders gained new technical knowledge and a strengthened appreciation of wind energy
This paper describes and measures the impacts of the implementation of three years of a cross-disciplinary community engagement project, connecting students in engineering and education courses, as a tool for teaching about wind energy, engineering design, and science education
Summary
The third year of our cross-disciplinary community engagement project, bridging college classes in engineering and education, was carried out in the Spring 2021 semester.Despite the continuity of this project from previous years, each implementation has been markedly different from all others, as the COVID pandemic disrupted the project midway through its second year and dramatically influenced the implementation of its delivery this past spring. The engineering and education students collaborated on cross-disciplinary teaching teams to design and deliver two lessons in the fourth-grade classrooms before Spring Break. This community engagement project, often referred to as the KidWind project—named after the wind turbine equipment supplies [2]—was motivated by a combination of factors, including contributing to the world’s sustainable future, local growth in wind energy development, changes to the local Kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) science standards, and the proven effectiveness of community engagement as a pedagogical tool. The importance of renewable energies in achieving our future sustainability goals is highlighted by the fact that two of the UN’s 17 SDGs focus on renewable and clean energy sources. This significance is further argued in the introduction to the special issue of Sustainability, “Sustainable Conversion of Renewable
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