1 TeachEngineering (TE) Overview

Introduction

This chapter contains an overview of the TeachEngineering (TE) system (www.teachengineering.org). We briefly discuss its origin as an attempt to build a unified digital library from a diverse set of K-12 engineering curricula which had been developed at various US engineering schools. At the time of its inception in 2002, few if any standard solutions for this problem were available and the system was designed and developed from the ground up. It became one of several hundred digital libraries which around 2005 comprised the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation (Zia, 2004). Now, quite some time later, TeachEngineering enjoys a user base of about 3 million users, has recently been rebuilt on a new architecture and remains as one of only about 35 collections in NSDL.

Brief History

In the late 1990s the Division of Graduate Education (DGE) of the US National Science Foundation started its Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education or GK-12 program (NSF-AAAS, 2013). The program meant to bring K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers and university graduates together in an attempt to develop new and innovative K-12 STEM curriculum. With an annual budget of about $55 million, by 2010 the program had made 299 awards at 182 institutions, provided resources to almost 11,000 K-12 teachers in 5,500 schools and impacted more than 500,000 K-12 students (NSF, 2010). In the process, a treasure trove of innovative STEM curriculum had been developed.

Unfortunately, most of that curriculum sat undetected on ‘Google shelves’ where, through the usual processes of web site entropy and link rot, it quickly became stale and abandoned as its creators, having completed their projects, went their ways. It was, as described by Lima (2011) in relation to information visualization websites, as if “the whole field suffers from memory loss.” To make matters worse, the GK-12 curriculum was not published to any standards and hence, existed in a multitude of layouts and electronic formats, various logical structures and hierarchies, and followed many different kinds of pedagogical approaches. As a consequence, much GK-12 curriculum was difficult to find; was lost in a sea of Google search results; was rarely aligned with K-12 educational standards; was not maintained; and was difficult to compare with and relate to other GK-12 materials.

Foreseeing this process of ‘curricular entropy,’ a group of engineering faculty and GK-12 grant holders at the University of Colorado, Duke University, Colorado School of Mines, and Worcester Polytechnic University, supplemented by one of us from Oregon State University (Figure 1) decided to apply for an NSDL grant to try and collect all GK-12 engineering curriculum —the E in STEM— standardize it, make it searchable, align it with K-12 educational standards, and host it as one of NSDL’s digital libraries. That was in 2002. Now, 20 years later, TeachEngineering is still supported by NSF and a variety of other funders. It has grown to more than 1,800 curricular resources contributed by many universities and programs and enjoys a patronage of about 3 million users per year. NSF’s GK-12 program is no longer active but curriculum developed in other NSF programs, such as Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) and Math and Science Partnership (MSP), as well as that by other K-12 curriculum developers continues to find its way to TeachEngineering for two reasons: because NSF encourages its grantees to publish their work in TeachEngineering and because TeachEngineering consolidates good K-12 Engineering curriculum in a single, searchable and easily operable location on the web.

The TeachEngineering Resource Collection

A quick look at the TeachEngineering curriculum (https://www.teachengineering.org/curriculum/browse) reveals how the library is structured. It consists of a collection of resources, each of which is of one of five types: activity, lesson, curricular unit , maker challenges and informal learning activities. Lessons introduce certain topics and provide background information on those topics. Practically all lessons refer to one or more activities which are hands-on exercises that illustrate and practice the concepts introduced in the lesson. When several lessons all address a central theme, they are often —although not necessarily— bundled in a so-called curricular unit. Informal learning activities are shortened versions of activities. They are not part of lessons and curricular units and are therefore not part of fully structured learning plans. Instead, they are meant for informal learning settings such as after-school clubs. All informal learning activities are in both English and Spanish. Finally, maker challenges are open ended design challenge prompts. Whereas activities are quite prescriptive, maker challenges are meant to maximize design freedom and project timelines.

All resources are further classified to belong to one or several of 15 subject areas (Algebra, Chemistry, Computer Science, etc.). For example, the unit Evolutionary Engineering: Simple Machines from Pyramids to Skyscrapers is categorized under the subject areas Geometry, Physical Science, Problem Solving, Reasoning and Proof, and Science and Technology. It has six lessons and seven activities. Lessons and activities do not have to be part of units; they can live ‘on their own,’ and activities can be part of curricular units without being part of a lesson. This hierarchical structure is strictly unidirectional. This means that whereas activities or lessons can live on units, units cannot live on a lesson or an activity. Nor can a lesson live on an activity (Figure 2).

As of June 28,  2022, TeachEngineering had 110 curricular units, 524 lessons and 1,125 activities. In addition to these hierarchically structured resources, TeachEngineering also contains sets of stand-alone learning resources: 41 maker challenges and 33 informal learning activities.

Controlled Resource Content

In order for TeachEngineering to expose and disseminate K-12 engineering curriculum in a single, unified, standards-aligned, searchable and quality-controlled digital library, a standardized structure was imposed on each and every resource. For instance, all activities, lessons and curricular units must have a summary section, a section which explains the curriculum’s connection with engineering, a set of keywords, the document’s intended grade level, the time required to execute it, a set of K-12 educational standards to which the curriculum is aligned, etc.

Figure 3 shows part of a TeachEngineering activity as it appears in a user’s Web browser. Note its Summary, Engineering Connection and the data in the Quick Look box.

Although the precise list of document components —different for different resource types— is not important here, it is important to realize that these components come in two types: mandatory and optional. Figure 4 graphically displays some of the components of a TeachEngineering lesson. Solid-line rectangles indicate mandatory components, while dashed lines indicate optional components. Note that the content specification once again is a hierarchy. For instance, while a lesson must have a grade specification (te:grade), the grade specification itself must have a target with optional upper– and/or lower bounds. When we consider this type of hierarchy as a tree (Figure 4), the leaves of this tree —its terminal nodes— must be of a specific computational data type (not shown in Figure 4). For instance, the target lowerbound and upperbound values must be integers.

Putting such strict structural and data type constraints on resource content accomplishes two things. First, it allows the construction of a collection of resources with a single, unified content structure and a common look-and-feel. Second, and just as important, it allows for automatic, software-based procedures for processing collection content. Examples of these processes are resource ingestion and registration —a process known as resource accessioning— quality control, resource indexing, and metadata generation.

The latter point ―automatic generation of metadata― is important as it is a classic bottleneck in the publication and dissemination of digital resource repositories. With metadata, we mean data about a resources rather than the resources’ content itself. For example, author names, copyrights and title, or in our case, things such as grade level, keywords, expendable cost, required time, etc. Collections which rely on manually entered metadata often suffer from the problem that manually entering such data is boring, time consuming, is error prone and must be reviewed and possibly redone when a resource changes or disappears. As a consequence, much of the items in digital libraries have very minimal metadata, which itself reduces their chances of being found in searches and therefore their chances of being used. Being able to automatically generate good metadata is therefore a good thing. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 cover the various ways in which TE content was and is controlled in TE 1.0 and 2.0.

2022 update. At this time ―June 2022― the ‘lack of metadata’ problem remains. As an example we mention the collection of NextGenScience Quality Examples, a set of 400+ digitally available STEM curriculum resources which have been lauded for their use of and alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards. Whereas the resources in this collection are of very good quality, they are difficult to find as a collection and they are impossible to search. Why? Because nobody has bothered to index them and to publish their metadata. Each and every one of the 400+ resources has structured content and is located somewhere on the Internet, yet nowhere is there a publicly, machine-accessible index of all these resources. We revisit this topic in Chapter 3.

K-12 Educational Standards

It will come as no surprise that in this age of performance metrics, K-12 education is subject to delivering predefined learning outcomes. These outcomes are known as ‘educational standards’ or ‘performance expectations.’ In the USA the determination and authoring of these standards is the authority of individual states and within the states sometimes that of individual districts. Although attempts at harmonizing standards across states have met with some success ―we refer to the Common Core for Mathematics and English and the Next Generation Science Standards initiatives (Conley, 2014; NRC, 2011)―, the USA educational standards landscape remains quite complex and in constant flux. Not only do standards change on a regular basis, but different states have different standards; they completely or partially adopt the harmonization standards, they write their own variations of those standards or they write standards of their own. When they write their own, the standards show great variety in granularity and approach between states (Marshall & Reitsma, 2011; Reitsma & Diekema, 2011; Reitsma et al., 2012). The fact that across the whole USA there are over many thousands of K-12 science standards, speaks to the complexity of the USA’s K-12 standards landscape.

Early in development of TE 1.0, our TeachEngineering team decided that we were in no position to continuously track evolving K-12 Science and Engineering standards and that we would prefer acquiring those standards from an external provider. Similarly, since figuring out for all 50 states and for each resource which standards are supported by (align with) which resource was not one of our core competencies, we hoped to acquire this service from another party.

Fortunately, at the time of TE 1.0 development, the Achievement Standard Network (ASN) project was established (Sutton & Golder, 2008) and was, like TeachEngineering, partly funded by NSF’s NSDL project. The ASN project maintains a repository of all K-12 educational standards in the USA, issues new versions when standard sets change and makes these sets available to others. The ASN is currently owned and operated by D2L, a learning-platform company. TeachEngineering has enjoyed a long-term relationship with ASN and although major differences exist between how TE 1.0 used to and TE 2.0 now uses the ASN, the ASN continues to function as TeachEngineering’s de facto repository of K-12 standards.

Whereas K-12 standard tracking is readily available from services such as ASN, standard alignment; i.e., matching learning resources with standards, is far more problematic. Although it is not our goal here to thoroughly analyze the standard alignment problem, it is important to know that in TeachEngineering each resource is aligned with one of more K-12 educational standards and since standards frequently change, these alignments must be regularly updated as well. Chapter 5 covers the differences between TE 1.0 and 2.0 in how they represent and include standards.

Collection Editing and Resource Accessioning

Although invisible to TeachEngineering users, TeachEngineering resources do not make it automatically and miraculously into the collection. Instead, they go through a structured review process, first for content and once accepted for content, for editing and formatting. Once a resource is ready, it must be ingested into and registered to the collection.

The process starts with TeachEngineering curricular staff and several external reviewers reviewing the submissions for content and compliance on standard TeachEngineering acceptance criteria. Is it engineering? Is it good science? Does it fit the objectives of TeachEngineering? Is it well written? Is it aligned with standards and do the alignments seem reasonable? Is it attractive, both for teachers and students? Is it internally consistent? Are concepts properly explained and procedures well described? Is anything missing? Depending on the answers to these questions, a submission might be refused, conditionally accepted, or accepted as is.

Once accepted, the resource must be formatted to fit the TeachEngineering resource template. This process changed quite dramatically between TE 1.0 and 2.0. Finally, the now formatted resource must be registered to the collection so that it can be searched, displayed, saved as a bookmark, commented on, rated, etc. Chapter 6 covers resource accessioning in both the TE 1,.0 and TE 2.0 versions.

System Implementation and Collection Hosting

Just as invisible to TeachEngineering users as the collection editing and document accessioning process, is the collection’s web hosting. Since TeachEngineering is a web-based digital library it must be web hosted and although the general principles of web hosting are the same for both versions 1.0 and 2.0, the specific implementations are quite different. Whereas TE 1.0 was hosted on Linux on an intra-university Linux cloud, TE 2.0 is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And whereas TE 1.0 used Google’s Site Search Engine, TE 2.0 uses Microsoft’s Azure Search and whereas TE 1.0’s website was written in the PHP programming language running against a MySQL relational database, 2.0 was written in C# running against the RavenDB JSON database. These differences are significant and reflect some of the more general developments in web-based technologies as they occurred over the last few years. We discuss and illustrate these elsewhere in our text.

Extras

In addition to the TE core functions mentioned above, a system such as TE has a number of what we would like to call ‘extras;’ facilities which make life for both the system maintainers and the system users easier. Some of these are the following:

• Facilities where users can store frequently used curriculum or where they can rate and review curriculum.
• Facilities for users to contact the collection maintenance staff; for instance, to report a problem or to ask a question.
• Facilities for the staff to track system use.
• Facilities which aggregate collection information so that at any time TeachEngineering staff can know how many documents of type x or from school y are stored in the collection.
• Facilities which make it easy for users to group and print curriculum.

Once again, both TE 1.0 and 2.0 had/have these (and other) facilities, but they architected them in different ways.

Continuous Quality Control

A system such as TeachEngineering is on-line and is meant to serve users anywhere in the world at any time. But it is also continuously changing in that new resources come on-line, existing ones are revised, new users register themselves, and users who care and desire to do so can leave comments and ratings behind. Add to that that TE has a few million (different) users per year and it becomes clear that a system such as this must be carefully monitored to make sure that it functions properly. And in case it stops functioning properly, technical staff must be alerted and informed about what is wrong so that they can fix the problem. Although both TE 1.0 and 2.0 employed significant amounts of monitoring, they go about it in different ways.

References

Conley, D.T. (2014) The Common Core State Standards: Insight into Their Development and Purpose.

Lima, M. (2011) Visual Complexity. Mapping Patterns of Information. Princeton Architectural Press. New York, New York.

Marshall, B. Reitsma, R. (2011) World vs. Method: Educational Standard Formulation Impacts Document Retrieval. Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’11), Ottawa, Canada.

NRC (2012) A Framework for K-12 Science Education. Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.

NSF (2010) GK-12: Preparing Tomorrow’s Scientists and Engineers for the Challenges of the 21st Century. Available: http://www.gk12.org/files/2010/04/2010_GK12_Overview.ppt.

NSF-AAAS (2013) The Power of Partnerships. A Guide from the NSF Graduate Stem Fellows in K–12 Education (GK–12) Program. Available: http://www.gk12.org/files/2013/07/GK-12_updated.pdf

Reitsma, R., Diekema, A. (2011) Comparison of Human and Machine-based Educational Standard Assignment Networks. International Journal on Digital Libraries. 11. 209-223.

Reitsma, R., Marshall, B., Chart, T. (2012) Can Intermediary-based Science Standards Crosswalking Work? Some Evidence from Mining the Standard Alignment Tool (SAT). Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 63. 1843-1858.

Sutton, S.A., Golder, D. (2008) Achievement Standards Network (ASN): An Application Profile for Mapping K-12 Educational Resources to Achievement Standards. Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Berlin, Germany.

Zia, L. (2004) The NSF National Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program. D-Lib Magazine, 2, 10:3.