In my efforts to pull together a science fair for our Homeschool Group I thought that the Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook would be a great resource to turn to for helping me organize and set up this large undertaking.

The Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook is a three hundred- and sixty-nine-page digital eBook to help discover and create an Engineering Design Project for 5th through 12th-grade students. It sells for $12.95 and contains thirty-eight Lesson Plans along with a Teacher’s Appendix, Teacher Information Pages, Printables for Parents, a How-To for using the book, The Engineering Design Process, Student’s Appendix, Student Information Pages, and several printables and forms to help you organize along the way.

The Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook specifically focuses on science projects that fall under the Engineering category. Engineering Science projects usually include designing, building, analyzing, modeling, or improving a device of some sort. The idea is that your students will become focused, independent learners by teaching the eight steps of the Engineering Design Process which includes...

• Identify a problem/need
• Research
• Brainstorming Solutions
• Selecting a Solution
• Building a Prototype
• Testing and Evaluating
• Redesigning to Improve
• Communicating Your Results

The Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook is meant to be used by a teacher or facilitator working with several students that may be divided into teams. I think this is important to know in case you are a homeschool parent looking to use this resource for just one child or a small family. This resource would be a much better fit for a homeschool group or co-op where there are several children able to work together. The author does mention “schools” several times so my thoughts are that it is meant to be used in many different kinds of schools or groups.

This resource is much more than I imagined. I have had to backpedal and think through my goals a bit more. The lessons are meant to span the entire school year ending in time to work on and complete your science fair projects with enough time to enter it into any regional or national fairs if you so choose.

Each lesson is not long but has a definitepurpose. The lessons very slowly guide the students into thinking logically and putting together a science fair project that falls under the engineering design process title.

There are no Engineering Science Projects for your students to recreate in this eBook instead the first several lessons walk you (and your students) through identifying a problem to solve which results in the engineering project.

My homeschool co-op got a late start in deciding to pull together a science fair. My original hope was to use this resource to put one on but seeing the work involved my hope is to do this in the next school year. Could Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook be used for our project? I hope and believe so. It will take work and we are just getting organized. This resource requires already committed teachers and students. I do think this would be a fantastic way to bring together a group of homeschool students to work on a great Engineering Science project.

If you have a group of students and a commitment to really formulate and pull together an Engineering Science Project I think that the Teacher’s Science Fair Guide to the Engineering Design Process eBook is very good for helping you to be organized about it and also make the process a very valuable learning experience for your students.

Product review by Kemi Quinn, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April 2019