In Vanderbilt's Magnolia Makerspace on a breezy April morning, the school year was winding down for Roberts Academy for Dyslexia fourth and fifth graders. It was a time of year when young learners might be daydreaming about summer vacations and pool days. But that Tuesday, all attention was on the lesson at hand: a boat float test, in which students determined how many quarters their carefully designed, 3-D-printed vessels could hold.
"They were all thoroughly entertained, watching whether their classmates' boats would sink or not," said Shakeera Walker, a Vanderbilt postdoctoral fellow who was observing the whirlwind of activity.
The event was the culmination of a 14-week collaboration in which teens at the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt designed and taught an engineering curriculum for Roberts Academy students. The partnership exemplifies the type of research-to-practice work woven into the ethos at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development, which houses both initiatives.
At the SSMV, Metro Nashville Public Schools students study science on Vanderbilt's campus throughout their high school careers. Core experiences include internships and a senior year Community Engaged Research Project (CERP). With the Roberts Academy collaboration, Quinn Weiler, Isabel Lopez-Jarqin, Anna Eiring and Hana Kajihara were able to turn their engineering internships into real-world impact for their senior projects.
Their efforts were welcomed by children at the Roberts Academy, opened at Peabody College in 2024 as a transitional, scientifically based elementary school for children with dyslexia. The school is poised for growth as it enters a new, state-of-the-art facility in August 2026, and assistant director Samantha Gesel hopes to see the SSMV collaboration evolve alongside that expansion. "We would love every student who walks through Roberts Academy's doors to get an opportunity to be really embedded in the science and research happening on campus," she noted.
Translating science through teaching
A fundamental goal of the SSMV, Angela Eeds explained, is teaching students multiple ways to communicate their knowledge. Eeds serves as director for Vanderbilt Peabody's Collaborative for STEM Education and Outreach, which oversees the SSMV program.
Teaching children is, essentially, translation science and an ideal way for SSMV students to practice their science communication skills while putting what they've learned over the past four years into action. For this project, teaching took the shape of eight lessons on buoyancy, boat design, the engineering design process and 3D printing.
The elementary learners were asked to apply engineering principles while building boat prototypes, which they tested for how much weight each model could hold. Then, after some time spent exploring Tinkercad, a computer-based 3D-modeling program, they each received a 3D-printed boat based on their vision-and compared that model to their prototype.
Below, a student weight tests their 3D-printed boat:
But creating and leading lessons wasn't always easy, reflected SSMV graduate Quinn Weiler, who will enter Vanderbilt this fall as a freshman in engineering. The teens sometimes found the lessons they designed were too short or too long, for example, and that decisions made as a teacher can make a big impact on student engagement.
"I have always had a huge amount of respect for educators," SSMV graduate Anna Eiring said, "but now I have even more reasons to be in awe of the work they do!"
Weiler agreed: "I think one thing we learned was the flexibility that's necessary in the lesson planning process, and figuring out how to effectively communicate information in a fun and engaging way."
That give and take of balancing teaching standards with making each lesson exciting was a favorite aspect of the experience for Weiler, who spent his SSMV internship in Vanderbilt's Department of Biomedical Engineering with Andrea Locke, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, before tackling the Roberts Academy project.
With Locke's team, Weiler conducted research on the creation of 3D-printed centrifuges for low-cost disease diagnoses. That research was a perfect segue into the Roberts Academy project, where he taught kids about each step of 3D designing, from core engineering concepts to building tin-foil prototypes and ultimately, translating the kids' designs into Tinkercad to create a final product.
Engaging learners with dyslexia
Gesel, along with SSMV instructor Shakeera Walker and Roberts Academy director Jared Clodfelter, met weekly with the SSMV student team to review lesson plans and share feedback about how to create the best educational experience for Roberts Academy students. Science can be challenging, since its content often includes multi-syllabic, Greek-origin words. In classrooms that draw most heavily on textbook reading, that content can feel daunting for a young dyslexic reader. But in the SSMV's curriculum, "the high schoolers designed the unit to be so engaging and hands-on," Gesel said.
"Instructionally, they tapped into areas of listening comprehension during science conversations that did not over-rely on reading or spelling needs."
That approach, Gesel added, was effective at capturing the brilliance of Roberts Academy students. "The SSMV students offered different ways to learn and to demonstrate learning, and they really made science come off the page. They elevated it to what science should be."
Moving education off the page, in a multi-sensory way, is shown to benefit dyslexic learners. The approach is also intrinsic across subjects and lessons at the Roberts Academy, where teachers strive to activate all the brain's processors through activities that require them to hear, see, speak, write and do.
The SSMV team even made what could have been a mundane part of the unit (outlining the engineering design process) a tactile experience: they printed out each step and had students place them in the order they thought they should go.
Experiential learning for all students
From fourth grade through high school and beyond, Peabody's outreach initiatives emphasize real-world experiences that make a difference in lives and communities. "They're doing really cool stuff at Roberts Academy," said Weiler, who has a cousin enrolling in the school for the upcoming academic year, "and it was interesting to see how intentional they were about working with dyslexic learners. It was a really positive experience, and I'm grateful for the support that they gave us."
Weiler enjoyed the experience so much that he hopes to find ways to carry educational outreach into his future studies. He remembers the impact that it made on him as a middle schooler when Vanderbilt students came to his school to teach science lessons. "If there's ever an avenue to incorporate something like that into my engineering work, that would be really nice," he said.
Similarly, Eiring, who will study landscape architecture at Cornell University this fall, hopes to integrate teaching into future volunteer work. "This experience is one that will definitely inform how I spend my time, especially in regard to topics I care deeply about," she concluded.
The immersive project was also memorable for Roberts Academy students. Many shared feedback saying that building and testing the boat prototypes, and then comparing it to a final, tangible product, was a highlight. Others loved learning how to use the Tinkercad app. "When you have the data right in front of you, that's really powerful and exciting," Gesel said.
-By Jennifer Kiilerich
