This past Wednesday, April 19, all 215 fourth grade students from the BWRSD traveled to the Roger Williams University campus for Kidwind, a unique partnership in which RWU education and engineering students teach wind energy and the engineering design process to the visiting elementary students.

The entire program included five weeks of classroom instruction where the younger students worked in small groups and learned how to build wind turbines before last week’s main event at the RWU campus, which included putting their own wind turbines through a wind tunnel to test their energy output. In all, more than 50 turbines were built and tested.

On this day, the RWU Campus Recreation Center was bustling with groups of younger students proudly carrying around the turbines they designed, tested, and improved until they finally came up with an optimal design to showcase at this event. Following the wind tunnel tests, students presented their turbine designs to a panel of experts, which included engineers from TPI Composites, SouthCoast Wind, and Orsted.

The campus visit afforded students the opportunity to practice the engineering design process with additional hands-on activities, including designing and building a bridge out of paper and Hot Wheels cars, and designing and building a catapult from popsicle sticks and rubber bands.

“This program was brought to us about five years ago,” said Jennifer Cotoia, a Science and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) teacher at Colt Andrews School. “The kids love this program so much. They get really really excited when when the Roger Williams students come and teach them…It’s really cool to see that process from start to finish and it's it's really exciting to see them complete the task.”

Guiteras student Douglas McGovern concurred. “It’s really fun,” he said, “especially building and testing our windmills.” Douglas also enjoyed the opportunity to interact with the professional engineers at the presentation.

About 30 education students and 22 engineering students participated in this year’s event, the fourth to be held in five years, and the first one to be held in person since the program’s inception in 2019. In conceiving of the program, it was determined to have education and engineering students collaborate, as the education students have the expertise in building a curriculum, while engineering students have the expertise to build turbines.

Maija Benitz, Assistant professor of Engineering, is one of the two principal RWU faculty members behind Kidwind. “The project was partly motivated by the fact that in 2018 Rhode Island adopted science standards that included an engineering curriculum,” she said, “but most teachers were trained to teach science, not engineering. So we created this project to help support the school district with meeting those engineering requirements.”

Kidwind links the students in Benitz’ Sustainable Energy Systems class with the students in Education Professor Li-ling Yang’s Teaching Inquiry Science in the Elementary School class. Joining forces in interdisciplinary groups, each team of University students were assigned to a team of students in each of the 11 BWRSD 4th grade classrooms.

For Stephanie Rioux, an Elementary Education major and a senior from Bedford, New Hampshire, Kidwind has been uniquely impactful.

“Participating in this program in 2021 was what made me realize that Science Education is my passion,” she said. “So since last summer I've returned to this project as a research assistant, and I see it on the other side.”

This time around, rather than working hands on with a group of students, Rioux met with each of the elementary education teams to review their lesson plans in advance. Just last week Rioux presented on the project at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research in Wisconsin.

“It was really exciting to share what we're doing here with other undergraduate researchers, and then it's really exciting to be here today with the Kidwind event, to get to experience it from this side and have all the fourth graders here and truly celebrate what we have been doing.”

For Jenny Kroon, a senior Engineering major from Franklin, Mass., this program is about more than introducing a scientific discipline to elementary students. With women still in the clear minority in engineering classes, Kroon sees this program as a great opportunity for young girls.

“When I was little there wasn't really anyone showing me the exciting side of engineering, so I wasn't thinking that's what I wanted to do with my future,” she said. “I think having a project like this for the kids to see it in action, and understand that it is a job and that there are people doing these things in the real world…you can really see the excitement on their face, which is so cool.

“It's been a really awesome opportunity to just connect with those kids and see the future generation of engineers, especially giving the opportunity for young girls. It’s going to continue to get better and easier and more common for girls to be in engineering, which is really awesome.”