This paper addresses an important consideration for promoting equitable engineering instruction: understanding how teachers contextualize curricular materials to draw upon student and community resources. We present a descriptive case study of two 5th grade teachers who co-designed a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular unit…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of engineering and the engineering design process, and describe the steps they took to develop a fifth grade-level, standards-based engineering design task titled "Getting the Dirt on Decomposition." Their main goal was to focus more on modeling the discrete steps they took to create and…