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Prior evidence suggests that active, student-centered learning environments can positively influence students’ perceptions of STEM career pathways, and that engineering activities can provide motivational contexts for learning math concepts. However, specific benefits to student proficiency in mathematics via engineering design activities are less well established, with some studies pointing to greater student improvement in mathematical practices than content comprehension. Previous studies also note that math standards can be effectively aligned with hands-on activities, but obstacles may include a lack of teacher confidence with engineering concepts and student aversion of math during engineering activities. This paper details an investigation of the prevalence of mathematics in middle school and high school engineering, particularly with regards to a study of thirty popular activities on the virtual library Teach Engineering. Results show that standards-based math content is clearly integrated into most of the reviewed activities, with math tasks comprising about one-third of the total activity time on average. Notably, the math tasks occur almost exclusively during (e.g., measuring) or after (e.g., plotting data) the hands-on phase of each activity; in other words, math was not used to inform design decisions or make predictions. The study suggests that more readily deployable engineering curricula that utilize math at the front-end of activities may be needed for better integration of all STEM disciplines and to more authentically demonstrate the utility of mathematics in the engineering field. 

In this article the authors describe how standard textbook questions can be turned into open questions to promote problem solving and reasoning. Six example solutions are given to one problem showing how an open problem can cater to the diversity of students in your class. 

A self-paced microcontroller activity was developed for a first-year college engineering course. Because the course is multidisciplinary and some students have no programming experience, scaffolding was included to allow individuals to create working code without knowledge of software-specific syntax. This approach, made possible by free drag-and-drop coding and open-source microcontroller programs, was intentionally designed to emphasize the logic and structure of coding, avoiding the common pitfall of syntax troubleshooting for novices. Student gains were made in knowledge of and confidence in microcontrollers and electronics over this five-day activity. 

A self-paced microcontroller activity was developed for a first-year college engineering course. Because the course is multidisciplinary and some students have no programming experience, scaffolding was included to allow individuals to create working code without knowledge of software-specific syntax. This approach, made possible by free drag-and-drop coding and open-source microcontroller programs, was intentionally designed to emphasize the logic and structure of coding, avoiding the common pitfall of syntax troubleshooting for novices. Student gains were made in knowledge of and confidence in microcontrollers and electronics over this five-day activity.