Design Squad’s mission is to get kids excited about engineering and inventing. For years Design Squad, the award-winning PBS KIDS program and website, has created activities, videos and clubs that aim to make engineering and invention accessible and fun for kids. Now, Design Squad is tackling a new content area: inventing for a sustainable future. We want to get kids thinking about how engineering and invention impacts environmental sustainability and how new inventions can help tackle environmental problems.
Design Squad Global Inventing Green is the latest addition to the Design Squad family of resources that challenges youth to brainstorm solutions that can help people with things such as lack of food, clean water, renewable energy, affordable energy, and ocean and land
pollution. These resources use the same core tenants found in the other Design Squad materials such as:
- Every child should and can participate in engineering and invention.
- Engineering and invention are most meaningful when kids have the opportunity to solve real problems faced by real people.
- Failing is to be embraced as a step that all engineers and inventors take in the Design Process.
- Students should have the opportunity to lead their own learning process with guidance from an educator.
- Hands-on learning experiences based on an open-ended problem lead to more successful experiences with engineering and invention concepts.
In the Design Squad Global Inventing Green Club PBS LearningMedia collection, the is objective: help kids build an environmental sustainability mindset when inventing. Design Squad wants kids to work to solve environmental problems with invention as well as learn to bring sustainability practices to the process of inventing. This includes thinking about material choices, where an invention goes once it has outlived its usefulness, and how an invention is powered.