While school field trips are valued as supplementary educational tools, Andersen and Zhang (2003) found that in practice field trips are often treated as one-off learning experiences and not furthered through connections to the classroom curriculum. Although students gain exposure to new phenomena and are able to participate in learning activities…

After many years of elementary science fairs, the time had come to redesign their family science event model. The displays were always well thought-out, the investigations interesting, and the science fair was always well attended. However, as the author listened to the conversations of the students as they put together their displays and the…

This article describes the steps incorporated to teach an engineering design process in a fifth-grade science classroom. The engineering design-based activity was an existing scientific inquiry activity using UV light--detecting beads and purposefully creating a series of engineering design-based challenges around the investigation. The…