Work in progress: Engineering design in secondary biology

Creating engineering design challenges is never easy. For seasoned engineers in academia, creating real-world context and content rich problems is difficult. For K-12 teachers, this task is even more challenging given their limited experience with engineering. However, initiatives such as the NGSS depend on teacher's ability to create and integrate engineering design as a topic. This Work in Progress paper evaluates engineering design challenges created by secondary biology teachers during a summer modeling based workshop. During the summer workshop, secondary school teachers assumed the role of students and learned about engineering design by direct instruction in order to create engineering design challenges based in the life sciences. Teams of 3-5 teachers representing a variety of schools created the challenges and posted videos of their plans on an online web-based platform (Edthena,