Perfect for Makerspace and STEM programs!

This teacher resource book for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades includes: 

• A year's worth of teacher lesson plans
• STEAM design challenges that turn middle school students into inventors
• Easy-to-follow lesson format (with standards identified for each lesson)
• Classroom-tested lessons

The STEAM Design Challenges in this 152-page book follow engineering practices to teach students in Grades 6-8 to solve a problem by designing, creating, and justifying their designs. They also allow art to support and enhance the learning of science and math while the engineering process is followed.  

These engaging lessons: 

• Integrate the Next Generation Science Standards and national standards from other disciplines
• Enhance learning across various disciplines
• Facilitate students in collaborating to solve real-world scenarios
• Promote critical thinking, analytical thinking, and reflective thinking
• Incorporate the Five Es Instructional Model (engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate)
• Are classroom tested

Engineering Design Process
The lessons in this book are intended to support the engineering design process in which teachers become a facilitator by encouraging and guiding students to work as a team to find a creative solution to a real-world problem without providing step-by-step instructions. Students are inspired to act as scientists and engineers through the use of sketches, diagrams, mathematical relationships, and literacy connections.  By creating their very own models and products based on background information from their studies, students are immediately engaged through a meaningful, rewarding lesson.

More about the lessons
Each lesson begins by presenting students with a design challenge scenario in order to immediately exite students with a real-world situation that they are on a mission to solve.  Students are then given a dilemma, mission, and blueprint design sheet and are asked to collaborate with team members to create several prototypes.  Students present their prototypes to their teacher, construct their design, test their design, engage in a class discussion about their design, and then modify their design.  Finally, teams create a justification piece in order to sell their new prototype (ex. persuasive letter, video, advertisement etc.).

About the Authors

The Steam Dreamers, a group of four classroom teachers, desired to create more interactive learning environments and science classrooms through student-centered problem-solving lessons.  They created this collection of cross-curricular design challenge lessons to provide teachers and students with real-world scenarios that are driven by core learning standards and enriched through the inclusion of literacy and the arts. 

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