Trigger the creativity of children by asking them to imagine possibilities beyond the story that they know.

• What if we create a tool, or system to help the characters solve their problem or escape the Giant?

• What if we redesign or improve a tool that is already used in the story? Could Rapunzel have a different way to raise and lower people coming to her tower?

• What if we save the princess, beat the dragon or overcome the Ogre or Troll in a new and different way? Could the three Billy Goats go around the Troll?With fiction, we are only limited by our own imagination! And remember…engineers often think out of the box to solve problems.

Engage the Engineering

 We have found that every fairy tale presents a problem in the plot that needs to be solved. Some ideas that we developed into engineering design process challenges include:

• Rapunzel  – Create an elevator for the tower

• Goldilocks – Engineer a new chair for Baby Bear

• Jack and the Beanstalk – Develop a grabber for the golden egg

• Cinderella – Design a castle to live in after the wedding

  
  

  Not everyone needs to solve the same problem! It's always interesting to watch two or three groups solve the same problem in different ways.

Music in the Liberal Arts was an introductory course for undergraduates offered at a small liberal arts college to fulfill distribution requirements in the humanities. The goal of the course was to help students understand music from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The organizer recruited faculty from many departments across the campus to explore with students in the course how their fields connected with music. For example, a psychology professor spoke about the emotional aspects of music and how music might influence mood and behavior. An anthropologist helped students understand music as a cultural phenomenon. A historian summarized how music changed over time, how it was shaped by events of the time, and how it influenced some of those events. A physicist explained the physics of sound waves, pitch, tone and tone quality, and amplitude. A biologist described the anatomy and physiology of the ear and hearing as well as the components of the human voice.

On the surface, this course appeared to epitomize an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and provide ample opportunity for the integration of concepts related to music. However, emerging research about human learning would suggest that this course’s attempt to connect the disciplines was not, in fact, interdisciplinary, and that its effort to integrate conceptual knowledge was not likely to succeed. Although students were given opportunities to learn about music from experts in many fields, the faculty were never asked to discuss their presentations with one another or to attend each other’s presentations. Thus it was highly unlikely that lecturers would deliberately or strategically tie together or explicitly reference the connections between the topics they discussed and those discussed by other professors. The course may have been multidisciplinary, but it was far from interdisciplinary.

Much more could have been done to help students make conceptual connections. For example, faculty colleagues from physics and biology could have worked together to pose related and connected problems for students to consider. To take a specific instance, the physics of sound explains that the longer a string is on an instrument, the lower its frequency will be. However, a bass singing voice is able to replicate the range of frequencies produced by cellos and many of the notes produced by a bass, even though human vocal cords are far shorter in length than any violin string. How can this seeming contradiction be reconciled? What are the biological adaptations that have taken place to enable this capacity in the human voice? What about in other species of animals? Such an approach could help students understand important physical and biological concepts and principles and also the connections among the disciplines of biology, physics, and engineering in the production of music.

(i) Disciplined (Substance): To what extent is the task and activities grounded on DISCIPLINARY insights?

(ii) Integrative (Coherence): Does the integration ENHANCE UNDERSTANDING of the concept within and beyond a particular discipline?

(iii) Purposeful (Relevance): Is the problem framed in ways that invite INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES?

Source: College of William & Mary curriculum unit Annex, Williamsburg, VA, USA