Establishing the foundations for engineering education in K-5

We have developed a volunteer program designed to enhance physical science education within elementary schools in the metropolitan Atlanta area (US). Elementary Science for Elementary Students (ES/sup 2/) brings demonstrations into the classroom that reach fundamental concepts in electricity, machines, structures, and sound. Each demonstration has the same basic format, beginning with a brief interactive lecture and visually based demonstration that emphasizes at most two fundamental concepts and ending with a hands on activity that allows students to experiment with these concepts. This format is a particularly effective teaching method, because it combines the three major learning techniques (visual, auditory, tactile) into a single presentation. In this way, each child is able to learn the concepts in their most natural mode of learning, reinforced by the two remaining modes. It is not only the students, but also the teachers that gain a better understanding of science through our demonstrations, improving their confidence in the material which enables them to teach more effectively in the future. In the first phase of ES/sup 2/, volunteers go into the classrooms and do physical science demonstrations themselves. Once we have gained familiarity and trust in the schools, however we seek to maximize our educational impact in elementary school curricula by providing demonstration materials to the individual schools and training teachers to do these demonstrations independently.