Changing perceptions: Do engineering activities make a difference in K-12 environments?

K-12 educators often incorporate projects into the science curriculum. Students conduct the activity, fill out answers on a corresponding lab sheet, strive toward results, and then move on to a new topic. With such an abrupt change in pace and lack of assessment, a question emerges: do these activities have a lasting impact on student learning or are these labs extraneous additions to the general curriculum? In an effort to integrate engineering concepts into a middle school environment, sixth graders were tasked with a design lab popularly known as “the marshmallow challenge,” which requires student teams to construct a tower from uncooked spaghetti, tape, and a single marshmallow. Approximately two months after the activity, the students who participated were asked to take a survey with four components: identification, opinion, objective, and open ended. The fifteen question survey was designed to determine if students enjoyed the activity and if students retained information from the short lecture before the activity. The results for the objective portion were averaged between classes and compared; this paper presents an analysis of those scores. Also, commonalities between written student responses are examined and discussed. These results are applicable to schools wishing to evaluate the effectiveness of brief activities similar to “the marshmallow challenge.”