Supporting and Amplifying Local Organizations Engaged in Playful Engineering-Based Learning Post-COVID is a grant funded by LEGO Foundation awarded to Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO), Tufts DevTech Research Group, and Tufts Department of Education to support a diverse group of outreach organizations in the United States, Nepal, and Rwanda.
With this grant, Tufts CEEO will build a collaboration with local education organizations whose missions align with playful learning, innovative approaches to learning, and Tufts CEEO’s fundamental belief in empowering teachers and students by allowing them to drive their own learning. Local organizations with established community relationships are essential to bringing playful engineering-based learning to students and teachers in the current complicated educational landscape where schools are juggling competing priorities. Tufts will center local organizations, their communities, their requirements and constraints, and the work they are already doing to advance playful engineering-based learning. Tufts and advisors will work to support these local organizations in building capacity by co-creating locally responsive resources in the form of training for formal and informal educators, developing activities and curricula, and more. In addition, the approach will prioritize social emotional components integrated with team-based hands-on playful engineering activities that are grounded in local communities’ assets and priorities; and will be agile to respond to the changing needs of learning being remote, in-person, or hybrid.
In the United States, Tufts will be collaborating with Urban League Head Start in St. Louis, Ke’yah Advanced Rural Manufacturing Alliance (KARMA) in Navajo Nation, Maryville University Center for Access and Achievement in St. Louis, Project SYNCERE in Chicago, and White Mountain Science in NH. In addition, Tufts will support Teach for Nepal and Karkhana in Nepal, and the Makerspace Consortium in Rwanda, which includes the Maranyundo Girls School that is supported by the Maranyundo Initiative.
The results of this collaboration will have a direct impact on students and families, improve organizational resources to support sustainability, and create an open-source library of resources for other organizations. This work will support teachers and students from many cultures, giving different viewpoints into how playful engineering-based learning can empower formal and informal learning.
