Development
The NFB EQ curriculum was developed by a team of blind and sighted educators and engineers, working together from several organizations including the National Federation of the Blind, Utah State University’s College of Engineering, and the Science Museum of Minnesota.
The curriculum was developed through an iterative instructional design process that was informed by external evaluations conducted by COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation. The original version of the curriculum was implemented at the 2018 NFB EQ program. That version of the curriculum was subsequently revised based on what the instructional team learned from blind youth and external evaluators at that year’s program. The second iteration of the curriculum was implemented at the 2019 NFB EQ program. Similarly, the 2019 version of the curriculum was further revised based on lessons learned to produce the final version of the curriculum. Through this website, the National Federation of the Blind is making the final NFB EQ curriculum available as an open educational resource.
Sequence
When executed in full, this version of the NFB EQ curriculum comprises 32.5 hours of instruction. Some of the lessons can stand alone. Other lessons require prerequisite skills that students develop in earlier lessons in the curriculum. Each lesson plan includes a list of prerequisite knowledge and, where applicable, links to the NFB EQ lessons that teach those skills.
If you plan to implement the curriculum in full, we recommend the following lesson sequence:
- Introduction to a Place of My Own
- Engineering 101
- Introduction to Drawing
- Intermediate Drawing
- Engineering Drafting and Multiview Drawing
- Basics of Nonvisual Woodworking
- Forming Foundations
- Fun with Forces
- Columns of Calculation
- The Roof System
- Forces in a Roof
- Expo Intro
The Defining Disability lesson can be facilitated at any point, as it is a stand-alone lesson.
At the 2018 and 2019 NFB EQ programs (PDF for hardcopy production only), students participated in field trips, informal engineering challenges, and Q&As with blind engineers, in addition to the lessons included here.
There are two progressive sub-sequences within the curriculum: the Drawing Sequence and the Engineering Sequence.
The Drawing Lesson Sequence
The three lessons in the Drawing Sequence progress from teaching basic skills, like using a pen, to introductory drafting skills, such as creating multi-view drawings.
The Engineering Lesson Sequence
The five lessons that comprise the Engineering Sequence progressively teach students to think like engineers. The lessons integrate mathematical analyses with model construction to help students make connections between abstract concepts and the structures they are engineering.