Engaging High School Students in an Engineering Thermodynamics Project

Abstract

Abstract-Efforts for recruiting and retaining students in engineering programs are evident in many postsecondary institutions around the world. These efforts include outreach programs at both elementary and secondary school level, as well as projects that develop capacities beyond technical content-often taught as declarative and procedural knowledge. The mandate of the Galileo Education Network Association includes the design of rich learning environments engaging K -12 students in authentic tasks: tasks that resemble the real work of professionals such as engineers. We describe the experience of enacting a sevensession engineering project in thermodynamics with Grade Ten students. Special attention is paid to formative assessment as an essential support for students' learning along the project. The initial project resulted from the collaborationas a means for teacher professional development-between this network association and the mathematics and science teachers in a western Canadian high school. We propose that programs for teacher professional development in mathematics and science should include a focus on tasks that resemble the work of engineering in order to design authentic, engaging learning tasks, and assessing strategies that support and enhance student learning Index Terms-Authentic tasks, Inquiry-based, Projectbased, Formative assessment.

Influence of an Immersive Virtual Environment on Learning Effect and Learning Experience

“…To promote the professional development of foreign language teachers, it is necessary to create a good immersive virtual environment, improve teachers' recognition of learning performance [14][15][16], and improve the learning experience of students, so that teachers can actively teach and students can learn more actively [17][18][19]. The structure of the research context is shown in Figure 1.…”