This report is the culmination of a master’s program resulting in a Master of Arts in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) Education. The author is a veteran high school physics teacher who has participated in the ongoing development of the Engineering Design and Problem Solving Course created by UTeachEngineering and The University of Texas at Austin. As a pilot instructor teaching this course, the author has experienced the teething problems common to radically new curriculum. The trials and tribulations of a twelve-week capstone design project, that was the last engineering challenge of the inaugural year of the course, are discussed. Reasons for the module’s failure and modifications for improvement are suggested and supported by a survey of current literature. The author uses the engineering design process to reengineer the Helmet DesignCapstone Project. This report identifies the needs of the teachers and students who are, in fact, the customers of the redesign, and provides a step-by-step plan for improving the project to make it easier for the teachers and more engaging for the students. All of the instructions and material lists needed to build the testing devices and conduct the student activities are presented in detail. In this second iteration of the project, the design challenge for the students will be to evaluate the impact performance of a skateboard-type helmet and use simple tests to characterize the impact performance of various foam types. Using the insights gained by the characterization of the foam, students will design and install foam composite padding into the helmet. The engineering principle that is being stressed is the use of data acquisition for making informed design decisions, rather than trial and error testing. The report concludes with some reflections by the author about the lessons learned while developing this project and the impact they will have on his classroom practices. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T15:00:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lilian Rodrigues.pdf: 564088 bytes, checksum: 3f7c5a980970eb94dcdeba82bcaf4a9c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-12-09 / The present research motivated to study the approach of the teachers‟ trainers with different initial backgrounds into a teaching action to develop the High School students‟ interest for the technological and engineering areas based on the Science Teaching. The main purpose is to identify the Political, Pedagogical and Epistemological aspects which are an influence in this particular approach intending to contribute for the developing of the future actions. For that, seven Training Teachers, participants on the project, were interviewed. In the results, we identified that one of the difficulties is related to the lack of discussion about the environment problems in the University. We also observed that the engineering professionals had post graduation courses on technical research having become specialists in specific areas, distant from the pedagogical, showing the need to go beyond the technical issue in which these professionals have been gone through in College, proving the extremely importance of Science history and philosophy study by the training teachers. This research is being analyzed by the studies, reflections and discussions on the problems and topics involved in this project we realized that it is difficult to find professionals with initial training who are able to get over all the found difficulties, but this approach was significant for them so the participants could think about their pedagogical knowledge and these thoughts were based on this critical reflection. / O presente estudo objetivou estudar a aproximação entre Professores, com diferentes formações iniciais, numa ação pedagógica, para despertar vocações para áreas tecnológicas e para as engenharias em estudantes do Ensino Médio por meio do Ensino de Ciências. O propósito foi identificar aspectos políticos, pedagógicos e epistemológicos que influenciam nessa aproximação, para que essa análise contribua para o aperfeiçoamento de futuras ações conjuntas. Para isso, foram realizadas entrevistas semi-estruturadas com sete Professores Formadores participantes do projeto. Observamos que os profissionais de engenharia passaram por cursos de pós-graduação, em que se priorizou a pesquisa técnica, tornando-os especialistas em determinadas áreas e resultando num distanciamento em relação à formação didático-pedagógica o que nos remete à necessidade de se superar a racionalidade técnica na qual estes profissionais foram formados e de um aprofundamento em história e filosofia das ciências por parte dos Professores Formadores. A pesquisa conclui pelos estudos, reflexões e discussões realizadas a respeito dos temas e problemas envolvidos no projeto, que não existem pessoas com uma formação inicial que dê condições de superar todas as dificuldades encontradas, mas que esta aproximação possibilitou aos sujeitos participantes reconstruírem algumas de suas compreensões didático-pedagógicas e que estas reconstruções foram pautadas numa reflexão crítica.