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In this comparative case study, we used activity theory to explain how and why different middle-school STEM teachers from the same professional development community made different curricular adaptation choices for biomimetic design activities. Analysis of teacher interviews, classroom observations, and lesson artifacts revealed that teachers’ choices for biomimicry activities were particularly influenced by confidence with and access to particular tools and by rules related to learning goals and time constraints. 

Abstract Engineering design entails making value‐laden judgments against ill‐defined, ambiguous, and/or competing sociotechnical criteria. In this article, we argue that such conditions make engineering designers particularly susceptible to the potentially deleterious effects of mis/disinformation in the processes and practices of engineering design, their engagement with people and communities, and in the production and evaluations of the artifacts they produce. We begin by critiquing dominant approaches to engineering design education, specifically, engineering education's social‐technical dualism and the ubiquitous ideology of depoliticization, which has exacerbated the effects of mis/disinformation in engineering design. We follow by outlining a framework for developing students' capacity for mitigating its effects in the specific context of engineering design thinking and making value‐laden engineering judgments and decision‐making. We envision three areas of opportunity for engineering design education to teach students strategies for navigating these challenges when engaging with (a) the processes and practices of engineering, which reflect the unique types of information students engage with across the design process, (b) people and their communities, including the strategic and careful performance of activities for gathering information, while mitigating the harms to misinformation and disinformation and maximizing the benefits of community involvement, and (c) the social and technical criteria of engineering design outcomes in the form of artifacts (e.g., products, processes). 

In this qualitative case study, we explore how first- and second year undergraduate students make space for expansive thinking in their engineering modeling work. We focus on the ways in which one group of five women negotiated the inclusion of different social, political, and economic factors in their design model, particularly energy distribution and transboundary equity. Drawing on discourse analysis methods, we analyzed a small-group in-class discussion and identified five expansive moves that helped the students to make space for rethinking what they could include in their model. These included being explicit about their assumptions and uncertainties and acknowledging task difficulties. 

In this work-in-progress qualitative case study, we explore how first- and second year undergraduate students experience uncertainty when doing expansive thinking in sociotechnical engineering modeling work. For this purpose, we analyze stimulated recall interviews of four students to identify the different ways in which they experienced both relational and epistemological uncertainty during an in-class discussion activity. 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while scientifically exploring the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of the units is “Accessible Playground Design,” a grade three unit that engages students in designing a piece of accessible playground equipment. It comprises 10 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including a launch lesson, followed by four inquiry and four engineering design lessons, and a final design exposition. 

Although curricular resources for elementary engineering design continue to grow, it remains challenging to identify assessment tools that focus on students’ reasoning within engineering design and that are feasible for classroom use and accessible for emerging writers. In collaboration with third-grade teachers, we developed an open-response task that asks students to evaluate and improve on the first iteration of a design solution. In this paper, we present the assessment task and an exploratory analysis of the pre- and post-unit responses collected from one classroom implementation using the final version of the task. The evaluate-and-improve assessment task presents a diagram of an unbalanced, lopsided cart for transporting classroom plants and asks students to identify problems with the cart design, propose changes to improve it, and justify those proposed changes. Across their pre- and post-unit responses, the 18 students proposed 14 different changes and provided seven different justifications to support those changes. Students included more justifications in their post-unit explanations, especially when they did not include any justifications in their pre-unit responses. Our exploratory study of this evaluate and improve task suggests that it gives third-grade students an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to scope problems, propose design iterations, and justify those changes. 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while also exploring scientific explanations of the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of these units is “Make Way for Trains,” a fourth grade geotechnical engineering unit comprised of 8 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including a launch lesson, 6 alternating inquiry and engineering design lessons that build to the final design challenge, and a final design exposition. 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while also exploring scientific explanations of the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of these units is “Reservoir Rescue,” a fifth grade Environmental Engineering unit comprised of 12 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including 2 lessons to launch the unit, 4 inquiry lessons, 4 engineering design lessons that build to the final design challenge, and 2 lessons to prepare for and host a design exposition.