The YES Mission

Youth learn through meaningful engagement in authentic tasks. As students engineer, they should participate in activities that connect to their lives, expand their horizons, and engage them in disciplinary practices.

All young learners can and should engineer. All students need opportunities to develop their engineering interests, ways of thinking, and identities, because engineering solutions are strengthened by a diversity of experiences, ideas, and approaches.

Youth learn with and from each other. Learning and engineering are both social activities. Thus, during engineering lessons students should communicate, negotiate, and explain their ideas and thinking in small-group and whole-class discussions.

Engineering impacts our society and our world. To create engineering solutions for all, students should consider the social, environmental, and ethical implications of their designs. Similarly, students should connect their engineering work to their own lives and communities.

High-quality curricular materials promote educator learning. Carefully designed curricular materials help educators expand their engineering knowledge and instructional practices, build their confidence to teach engineering, and recognize untapped student potential.

At the heart of YES products is the use of a structured, iterative process to solve problems. YES organizes students’ work with an age-appropriate, cyclical, engineering design process. This is not a rigid process. As students engineer, they move back and forth between phases. After proceeding through the basic phases, learners improve their design by repeating the cycle.