Designing from a Novel University Engineering Course as a Model for High School Education

Abstract

K-12 teachers seek examples of relevant and appropriate content that engages a diverse audience for their courses. Naturally, teachers may look to universities for inspiration and even curriculum and course content. In this innovative practice paper, the researchers worked with an urban public high school that had an existing partnership with our home university; this was a natural place for high school teachers to find educational examples. Our university recently created a novel introductory robotics course which the leadership at the partner high school saw as an attractive model for an 11th grade engineering course. To help create the high school engineering course, we facilitated participatory design sessions with various educational stakeholders who had varying visions for the course; these stakeholders included high school teachers, university faculty, educational researchers, and undergraduate students who had previously taken the university robotics course. In this paper, the authors explore the ways in which ideas from the participatory design sessions shaped the first iteration of the engineering course. A design challenge the authors faced was incorporating the stakeholders’ competing and sometimes contradictory visions for the course into instructional materials. In this paper, we present these methods of integration as a model for others seeking to adapt university engineering courses for a high school context.