Can kindergarten-aged kids actually learn to do engineering? Of course they can! Young children are natural inventors, designers and experimenters. The City Technology STEM activities for kindergarten have been used very successfully with children aged 4-6. They not only introduce STEM ideas to young children, but also promote literacy, math, fine motor skills and artistic creativity.
Invent-a-Wheel engages kids in exploring gravity and friction by find out what it takes to get an object to slide down a ramp. The exploration begins in the playground: what kinds of surfaces will make it easier or harder to go down the slide? Are you better off with your coat on or off? What happens if you sit on a rubber mat, a towel or a piece of cardboard? These issues come up again in the classroom, as students try to make a small cardboard “sled” slide down a larger cardboard ramp, covered with cardstock, aluminum foil, wax paper or felt. Some surfaces make it easier, while others make it harder for the sled to slide down. One idea is to put rollers under the sled. These could be straws, markers or glue sticks. However, the sled and the rollers usually separate when they get to the bottom of the ramp. If you attach the rollers to the sled, they become wheels, and the sled becomes a car! Kids create material lists making a car, draw what the car will look like, and then create their own cars. They write “how-to” books showing someone else how to make one and then customize their cars using craft materials.
Mech-a-Blocks are pegboard pieces in the same shapes and colors as pattern blocks. The holes provide places to join the blocks together with paper fasteners. Using Mech-a-Blocks, kids can create mechanisms or structures and learn the difference between them. They create and draw mechanisms in which one piece controls another, make models of their mechanisms in cardstock, and make models of familiar mechanisms such as scissors, nutcrackers, jar openers and tongs. They explore directions of motion of a mechanisms, and investigate how the two sides of a seesaw move depending on the location of the pivot. The Mech-a-Blocks unit culminates in an open-ended project, which engages kids in creating their own mechanisms to tell a story or express an idea. For example, their mechanism might show how to milk a cow, or how the sun rises and sets. Along the way, kids have numerous opportunities to talk about, write about and draw their mechanisms.

About the Author:
Gary Benenson is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the City College of New York. Over the last 30 years, he has been working with teachers and kids to develop and test strategies for introducing engineering in the elementary grades. He is one of the founders of the City Technology Project, a collaboration of college faculty with elementary teachers who work in the NYC Department of Education. He has two children and five grandchildren, all of whom attend or attended public school. His daughter teaches kindergarten in Northern Manhattan.