Experiences with an engineering technology course for education majors

This paper describes our experience in transferring a lesson plan from a capstone education course on science and technology to a high school classroom. Engineering 491, Engineering Technology, is a new capstone course that introduces in-service and fourth year pre-service teachers in math and science education to engineering problem solving through specific practical applications. The mechanical engineering 2-week portion of the course focuses on the design process using a commercially available computer-based simulation followed by prototype construction and testing. The ever popular egg-drop assignment is used in a project team environment. One year after taking the course, a student teacher used the computer program and egg-drop experiment in a physics class at a rural high school in northern Nevada. The students first used the computer simulation to explore the effects of the various design parameters and then constructed their own devices. Out of a class of 18 students, about half of the eggs survived. We found that students had difficulty understanding the computer simulations and required a lot of hands on testing to truly grasp the concepts of elasticity and damping