Novel Engineering, K-8: An Integrated Approach to Engineering and Literacy

With the Novel Engineering approach, “students become excited about what they are reading, writing, designing, and building! This excitement in turn helps them make strides in engineering and literacy, as well as in their abilities to work together, think creatively and analytically, and communicate their ideas.” ―from Chapter 1 of Novel Engineering This book will both introduce your students to an exciting integrated curriculum and support you as you use it in your own elementary or middle school classroom. Novel Engineering shows how your students can work through engineering design challenges inspired by a broad range of literature―novels and short stories, biographies and histories, or even picture books. By way of introduction, the book offers clear conceptual background and practical advice on how the approach works: Your students pull information from literature to identify a problem. Then, using details from the story or text, they go through an engineering design process to develop functional solutions for their “clients”―the book’s characters. To support your efforts and bring the concept to life, the book gives you five in-depth case studies featuring the use of novels, a biography, and a nonfiction historical text. In addition to demonstrating what a Novel Engineering project looks like in an actual classroom, the case studies give you practice in thinking about what your students’ work might look like and how you would respond. One case describes a class in which students help the shipwrecked Swiss Family Robinson build a shelter to keep them cool under the hot sun. Another tells of students who design a hearing aid for the main character in El Deafo―and then style it as a fashion accessory. You’ll see that the books used in the case studies are just suggestions. You don’t have to adopt texts outside your existing English language arts or social studies curriculum. You also don’t have to buy a specific building-materials kit. You just have to embrace the idea that literacy and engineering can support each other in your classroom―and then watch the excitement build.

Elissa is Director of Outreach at Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. She works to provide schools, teachers, other organizations, and students with engineering design opportunities. Before coming to Tufts CEEO, Elissa was a classroom teacher, working with high school students with special needs. She began working with the CEEO in 1999 while teaching at a local school, bringing engineering into her English classroom. The following year she entered Tufts as a graduate student at the Center, taking classes in engineering and education, and received a MEd. Excited by the Center's work and mission, Elissa continued working at the Center.

Elissa is particularly interested in using open-ended, client-centered problems to bring engineering to elementary and middle school students, exploring ways that students with different learning styles and interests can become excited by and access engineering. As an extension of this work with students, Elissa is interested in understanding what teachers need as they bring engineering with messy, ill-defined problems into their classrooms.