New STOMP Cohort

By Laura Fradin, Education Specialist

New STOMPers engage in a classic design challenge, Spaghetti Towers.

With the start of the new semester, the CEEO welcomed STOMP Alum Laura Fradin as the new Education Specialist to work on multiple projects including LEGO Outreach, Novel Engineering, Design and Engineering Workshops, and various research projects. Laura also manages the STOMP program. As the STOMP Manager, Laura has been working hard to hire new STOMP Fellows and schedule times for 43 elementary and middle school classrooms in Boston, Everett, Medford, Malden, Somerville. STOMP is in 1 kindergarten classroom, 6 third grade classrooms, 16 fourth grade classrooms, 16 fifth grade classrooms, and 4 middle school classrooms.  After hiring 23 new STOMP Fellows. STOMP now has 55 STOMP fellows and 6 STOMP residency program participants. Our recent cohort of new STOMPers is 75% engineers and 71% female. This year the program as a whole is 64% female and 36% male. STOMPer training, which occurred on October 1st, allowed STOMPers to engage in some team building challenges; learn about teaching methodologies, classroom management, and age appropriate practices; and familiarize themselves with technologies like Mindstorms robotics, BlocksCAD, and Scratch coding. STOMPers are now designing and implementing engineering curricula in their classrooms, bringing engineering to roughly 800 elementary and middle school students in the Greater Boston Area!

STOMPers discuss age appropriate practices and how to introduce various engineering concepts to K-12 students.

October 16, 2017 at 10:00 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Design and Engineering Workshops – Summer 2017

Over the summer the CEEO hosted 11 different workshops for children age five to eighteen.  For younger students there were workshops that focused on exploring engineering while helping out characters from their favorite PBS shows and also learning the engineering design process through stories, songs and hands-on activities.  There was a session of Girls Design and Engineering Workshop where the students explored topics of simple electronics, human factors, programming, robotics, and user-centered design, focusing on engineering but also paying attention to the client.

Continue Reading September 27, 2017 at 9:45 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Summer Undergraduate Internships

Every summer, CEEO hires 30-40 Undergraduate Student Interns to work on various research, outreach initiatives, or operations support  projects at the CEEO. This past summer we had 37 undergraduate students from Tufts and a few other Universities working at the CEEO on the projects listed below.

Continue Reading September 26, 2017 at 10:35 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

An Afternoon of Learning and Hacking

by Whitney Crooks, PhD Graduate in Mechanical Engineering

On Friday, July 7th, the CEEO hosted an afternoon of learning and hacking with MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK), which shares a love of LEGO with the CEEO and has a similar mission: “develop new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and fingerpaint of kindergarten, expand the range of what people can design, create, and learn.”

Continue Reading August 10, 2017 at 11:40 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Maker Workshop with Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

by Elissa Milto, CEEO Director of Outreach

Dr. Daniel Hannon received a CEEO Innovation Grant from the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach to run a Maker workshop in order to help develop social awareness in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). He and Elissa Milto, CEEO’s Director of Outreach, structured this pilot workshop to look at understanding how adolescents with ASD  gain social skills to help them more fully integrate into society, to  interact meaningfully with one another, and to become better prepared for jobs in the future. There is very little research on adolescents with ASD so the researchers wanted to better understand how to support this age group to become productive members of society.

Continue Reading July 20, 2017 at 11:43 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Maker Games

by Matt Mueller, Doctoral Student in Mechanical Engineering

Hello, my name is Matthew Mueller and I am a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering interested in simplifying interfaces for digital fabrication tools (like 3D printers and CNC machines) and developing ways for young students to engage in authentic engineering design.  As part of the 2016/2017 CEEO Innovation grant, David Alsdorf and I have created the MakerGames, a game designed to leverage the power of make believe play and to spark thoughtful conversations about engineering concepts as students engage in open ended design challenges.

Continue Reading July 17, 2017 at 10:49 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

The Power of Strategic Under-Instruction

By: Mike Kulbieda, Maker/Design Coordinator, International School of the Peninsula, Palo Alto, CA

As the Maker/Design Coordinator at the International School of the Peninsula I have the privilege of spending my days in the “makerspace” designing and facilitating lessons to encourage tinkering, exploration, collaboration, and creativity, all in service to the act of creation and skill building. I have a passion for learning by doing and as an educator have always kept that at the forefront of my teaching. Recently I reflected on a session I had with third graders in Design class on circuitry. I had placed some materials in a few boxes including batteries, small LED lights, aluminum foil, wooden sticks, pipe cleaners, and straws, and placed them in the center of each table with the idea that I would let the kids explore the materials and hopefully come to some conclusions about their relationship to each other, and how some could conduct electricity and some couldn’t. Most groups went straight for the LED light and coin cell battery and made it light up by squeezing the positive and negative leads of the light to the positive and negative terminals of the battery. Distracted by the fact that they made something light up, the other materials were left in the box untouched and unexplored. I thought to myself, “fail.” I had hoped that at least one student would make the connection between the battery, the light, and the conductive materials int their boxes in order to segue into extending electricity through circuits. No luck.

Continue Reading June 29, 2017 at 2:10 pm Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Early Childhood Makerspace

by Amanda Strawhacker, Doctoral Student in Child Study and Human Development and Miki Vizner, Master’s Student in Child Study and Human Development

Makerspaces are an exciting space to foster creative learning through building artifacts. These 21st century engineering workshops are a growing area of interest for both education researchers and school practitioners,and many resources (e.g. makered.org) refer to the benefits of making for children as young as Kindergarten aged. However, most makerspaces are designed for much older age group. With support from the CEEO Innovation Fund, Ph.D. student Amanda Strawhacker and M.A. student Miki Vizner, both of Tufts’ Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, set out to research and develop a developmentally appropriate Early Childhood Makerspace, for children ages 4-8 years. This mission of this space is, 1) to serve an active making community of children and their guardians or educators, and 2) to provide a testing site for Tufts researchers to investigate making and learning in early childhood.  

Continue Reading June 1, 2017 at 10:29 am Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

Becky McDowell wins Program Excellence Award at the ITEEA Conference

Becky McDowell, a K-5 STEM Teacher at the Barrington 220 School in Wauconda, Illinois and TEEP Alum (2016) won the Program Excellence Award at the ITEEA Conference this year. The Program Excellence Award is presented in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession and students and is designed to recognize exceptional technology and engineering education programs in each state.

Continue Reading May 22, 2017 at 2:48 pm Alison Blanchard Leave a comment

“Making” in the White Mountains: Meet Our Partners at WMSI

by Susan Bitetti

One of the incredible aspects about working at the CEEO is the opportunity to collaborate with some really wonderful and unique educational spaces. White Mountain Science Institute (WMSI) in Bethlehem, NewHampshire led by CEEO fellow Bill Church, is one such space. WMSI is not a typical afterschool setting; while the staff have their own space in downtown Bethlehem for developing educational technologies in-house, they visit neighboring classrooms with their “Mobile STEM Lab.”

Continue Reading May 17, 2017 at 12:43 pm Alison Blanchard Leave a comment