OVMS staff members spent a recently learned about the Novel Engineering approach from Dr. Adam Maltese from the IU MILL at the IU School of Education. Dr. Maltese explained that with the Novel Engineering approach, students become excited about what they are reading, writing, designing, and building. This excitement helps students make strides in engineering and literacy, as well as their abilities to work together, think creatively and analytically, and communicate their ideas.
The Novel Engineering approach shows students how to work through engineering design challenges inspired by a broad range of literature -- novels, short stories, biographies, histories, or even picture books. By way of introduction, Novel Engineering offers a clear conceptual background and practical advice on how the approach works: students pull information from literature to identify a problem. Then, using details from the story or text, they go through the engineer design process to develop functional solutions for their "clients" -- the book's characters.