The YES Learning Library provides educators with resources to refresh and improve their engineering education pedagogy. The library includes video from classrooms, student work artifacts, reflection questions, and more, to give educators a multimodal, online learning experience. Select one of the topics below to get started!
Developing high-quality educational materials is an intentional process. Three decades of research and development by the YES team inform our model for engineering learning.
Explore the design principles for each of the four dimensions of our framework below.
Authentic Engineering PracticesYES units engage students in engineering practices—patterned behaviors that lead to the creation of engineering knowledge and products. Research conducted by the YES team has identified 16 common engineering practices. | |
Students engage in real-world engineering challenges that expand their horizons while connecting to their lives, communities, and cultures. Activities begin with narratives that demonstrate how engineers shape our world by solving problems.
Students consider who or what is most affected by the problem and how. They use this knowledge to make design decisions.
Students identify consequences, positive and negative, of engineered solutions. They consider the potential impacts of the technologies they design.
Students explore family connections to the engineering problem that are relevant to their everyday lives. They draw upon their prior knowledge and leverage their personal experiences to design solutions.
Students of all ages and ability levels participate in scaffolding activities that develop necessary knowledge, skills, and tools. Previous familiarity with materials, tasks, or terminology is not assumed.
Students interpret content and express their understandings in a variety of ways. These span listening, speaking, demonstrating, writing, and drawing.
Students use inexpensive, common materials to build the technologies. Because these materials are affordable and available, learners can continue their engineering explorations at home.
Students learn from diverse role models in context-setting narratives, videos, and their community. Each unit introduces role models who reflect the diversity of individuals involved in engineering.
Students develop interest, knowledge, abilities, and identities by engaging in authentic engineering practices from a young age. These early, successful experiences build students’ confidence in and affiliation with engineering and encourage a problem-solving mindset.
Engineers use a structured, iterative process to solve problems. YES organizes students’ work with an age-appropriate, cyclical, engineering design process. Naming design phases helps students understand the goal of the activity.
This is not a rigid process. As students engineer, they move back and forth between phases. After proceeding through the basic phases, learners improve their design by repeating the cycle.
Explore the phases:
