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I am also a preservice teacher! I think that having students do an engineering task at the end of a unit/lesson as an evaluation is a great way to integrate STEM! I really like the GRASPS model for performance tasks, which gives students a Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Product/Performance and Purpose, and Standards for Success. I created a science unit for one of my classes where students were looking a heredity and different traits between parents and offspring. We were also looking at survival and how parent animals help thier babies survive. At the end of the unit, we gave them a performance task as an evaluation tool. We gave them a story about an orphaned baby animal that had been found, and we listed some traits of the baby. Then we gave them their perofrmance task. Here is the GRASPS model that we used:
Goal: Your task is to design a parent for an orphaned baby animal.
Role: You are a scientist who has been asked by a zoo to create a parent for a newly discovered orphaned baby animal.
Audience: You need to convince the zoo that your parent matches the baby and can take care of it.
Situation: The context you find yourself in is that a baby animal has been discovered with no parents, you must create a parent that can successfully take care of the baby.
Product/Performance and Purpose: You will create a diagram including a drawing of your parent animal and label characteristics it has in order to prove that it has characteristics that help the baby survive.
Standards, Criteria for Success, and Constraints on the Solution: A successful result will include a parent animal that can successfully take care of the baby and has similar traits.
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