This is the narration of a course designed for high school students, in the spirit of Fab Academy. This document exists to start the dialogue on how to teach many of the skills of Fab Academy in such a way that they are 1) understandable to high school students 2) appropriately curated for local teaching conditions (time, tech available, etc.) and 3) consider the holistic picture of a developing student.
The core concept for the course will be to study various skills (grouped as units) for a period of weeks so that students can build skills over time. Each unit will address a topic that is effectively one week’s work in Fab academy, but will be stretched to around three weeks for the high school students. [Due to the variable scheduling of high school holidays and events, as well as student development patterns, this timeline is quite flexible.] The theme for each unit will oscillate between a ‘design’ focus and a ‘technical’ focus, in order to support the various learning styles of students. An example of this would be to spend one unit on 2D design [design unit], the next on Git and HTML code [technical unit], then 3D design [design unit] and end with electronics [technical unit]. By alternating between ‘technical’ and ‘design’ units, the vision is to support students who may have a predilection toward one type of work and against the other. For example, if a student loves design, but struggles with technical work, they will be able to look forward to upcoming units. This general theme was also followed within Fab Academy, although it is not explicitly stated during the course.
The instructor for this course is Corey Rice, who graduated from Fab Academy in 2017. The course is being run at Mayfield High School, near Cleveland, Ohio, USA and meets for 50 minutes, 5 days a week for an entire academic year. That adds up to approximately 150 contact hours with the same students in class. Since the course is run as an elective, it is not strictly held to any state or national standards; however, much of the class does fall into the ISTE recommended technology standards or other sanctioned national academic standards. Standards alignment could be possible for the course, but will not be a primary focus of the instructor this year. This is an area for future development.
The students in the course are diverse in ethnicity, academic interests, academic ability level and kinesthetic ability level. There are 20 students, with 16 males and 4 females ages 16 to 18 years old. The technical background of each student is independent of the others, as it is largely based on personal interest. Not all students in the course have attended Mayfield City Schools for their entire academic career, and so they have varied technical and design backgrounds that vary based on their personal interests or family supports. It is also important to note that, like many Ohio school districts, there is no concrete curriculum for technology consistently implemented across the school district. This means that students could have diverse experiences with technology, even if they have attended Mayfield City Schools for their entire academic career.
From this groundwork, the course “Explorations in Engineering” is being developed. The academic content, local environmental factors, ability levels, and time available for the students and instructor must all coalesce around the goal of teaching students advanced technological skills. This teaching and learning must be focused in such a way that the skillset can be meaningfully integrated in the students’ understanding of the world. The skills themselves are obviously important, for the role they play in modern manufacturing, prototyping and project development. However, the study of these skills also reach another, more lasting goal. As is the case with many high school classes, the ability to think about their world in a new way is often more important than any facts or skills. The world will very likely change in the time between a student taking this course and when they could be employed doing such work professionally. The technical workflows covered in the course are incredibly vulnerable to change with any new technological advance. Therefore, the most valuable learning goal for any student in the course is to develop a new, abstract way of thinking about how they can control and interact with technical elements in their world. The question of how people relate to their technology will remain perennial, even as technology and the nature of human interactions change over time.