Abstract
This chapter provides another rich example of an integrated approach to early engineering education, namely the Novel Engineering program, which is designed to teach engineering and literacy in elementary and middle school classrooms. Through this approach, students derive engineering problems from classroom texts and then move through the engineering design process as they build solutions that are influenced by the characters, settings, and plots about which they are reading. The chapter introduces the Novel Engineering approach, shares how it has been implemented at the early elementary level, and leads the reader through examples of engineering and literacy integration . Finally, the chapter discusses what research associated with this project has found.
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The original Novel Engineering research team included Bill Wolfson and members of Engineering Lens (http://www.integratingengineering.org/) which had previously implemented a project that integrated engineering and literacy that served as the inspiration for Novel Engineering.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge all the Novel Engineering team detailed at http://www.novelengineering.org/about-us.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DRL-1020243. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Portsmore, M., Milto, E. (2018). Novel Engineering in Early Elementary Classrooms. In: English, L., Moore, T. (eds) Early Engineering Learning. Early Mathematics Learning and Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8621-2_10
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