ABSTRACT
STEM Education, particularly at the elementary and secondary level, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. Large-scale research reports in the United States and around the world have supported increased attention, time, and research on instruction both in the individual STEM disciplines and integration across disciplines. One strong motivation for focus on STEM education is to fill and replenish the 'STEM pipeline', or more plainly, to increase the number of students studying in STEM fields. This chapter offers the author's experiences working with high-achieving young children in an enrichment class on a STEM design challenge based on this engineering design process model during her student-teaching field experience. One key component of STEM education is a matter of discovering how the natural world is structured. The goal of the first day was to introduce the students to the concept of the design challenge.
