Montague Township School District
STEM: Engineering & Robotics Curriculum Guide
Grade 8
2025-2026
Kayte Snyder
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Description
Engineering and Robotics is a trimester STEM course open to grades 5–8 that meets every other day for 40-minute sessions. The course introduces middle school students to critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and the Engineering Design Process through hands-on projects. Students explore basic physics concepts (gravity, load, structure, beams, force, tension, compression) and develop proficiency with Computer Aided Drafting (CAD). The course emphasizes active participation and real-world application, with students addressing design challenges that involve specific constraints and limitations. Civil engineering serves as the primary disciplinary focus, allowing students to design and build structures such as bridges and towers. Throughout the course, students engage in formative, summative, alternative, and benchmark assessments to gauge progress and inform instruction.
Big Ideas
- Engineers use a systematic design process to solve real-world problems within specified constraints.
- Safe practices and proper tool use are essential to engineering work and the world of work.
- Understanding how structures respond to forces like gravity and load is central to civil engineering design.
- Multiple disciplines of engineering have contributed to technological development and shaped modern society.
- Collaborative design and iteration improve solutions and help teams address trade-offs between competing demands.
Essential Questions
- What safety precautions are critical to follow?
- What is engineering and how does it fit into STEM education?
- What are the necessary steps to efficiently solve a problem using the engineering design process?
- How is the solution going to be influenced by design constraints?
- What is structure and how does structure relate to function?
- How can decisions be made collaboratively and fairly?
Engineering Design
Interaction of Technology and Humans
Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science
Geometry
Standards for Mathematical Practice
Students engage in collaborative discussions with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly while working through design challenges and presenting their engineering findings.
Students apply mathematical practices including making sense of problems and persevering in solving them, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing viable arguments, modeling with mathematics, using appropriate tools strategically, and attending to precision while designing and testing structures.
Students apply the engineering design process to define criteria and constraints, evaluate competing solutions, analyze test data, and develop models for iterative testing while following multistep procedures and safety protocols.
The course employs a balanced assessment approach across formative, summative, alternative, and benchmark measures. Projects comprise 50 percent of the grade and focus on in-class work addressing unit objectives through group planning, problem-solving, and product creation that reflects solutions to design challenges. Classwork and homework comprise 25 percent and assess daily skill development and preparation for future projects. Assessments and quizzes comprise 25 percent and gauge understanding through mini-projects, challenges, presentations, digital forms, and exit tickets. Benchmark assessments for grades 6–8 are administered throughout the course to monitor student progress.
| Unit | Formative | Summative | Benchmark | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Lab Safety/What is Engineering? | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 02The Engineering Design Process | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Design Challenges and Problem Solving: Civil Engineering | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 3/3 | 3/3 | 2/2 | 3/3 |
| Unit | IEP | 504 | MLL | At-Risk | Gifted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Lab Safety/What is Engineering? | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 02The Engineering Design Process | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Design Challenges and Problem Solving: Civil Engineering | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 3/3 | 3/3 | 3/3 | 3/3 | 3/3 |