By Elissa Milto

In Spring 2025, two Tufts undergraduate students worked at the Benjamin Banneker School’s afterschool program as part of the CEEO Outreach Learning Fellows (OLF) Program. The afterschool program was led by Jennifer Gordon, the school’s librarian, and Dwear Carre, a classroom teacher. The program was part of the school’s year-long project examining water quality and access throughout the world. Ms. Gordon and Mr. Carre facilitated the reading of A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, and the Fellows supported students in weekly engineering engagements.

The weekly OLF classes began with engineering skill-building activities and then focused on engineering problems situated in A Long Walk to Water. The Fellows helped the younger students think about constraints and criteria embedded in the story as they designed and built engineering solutions for the book’s characters. The Banneker students worked on their solutions for several months and then presented them to Elissa Milto, CEEO Director of Outreach, and other visitors from their school at the end of May.

Each group articulately described their thought process behind the design decisions and how they thought their solution would improve the lives of the characters. A few weeks later, Milto (pictured) attended Banneker’s STEAMS Expo in June, where each classroom presented a different aspect of water quality and access, and Novel Engineering was featured as part of several classrooms’ work.