Amazon Future Engineer Tech Tours are interactive, virtual field trips that take students behind-the-scenes to explore the inner workings of Amazon's latest technologies and to discover the careers that bring these innovations to life. Through video and interactive questions, students learn new STEM vocabulary, uncover how a certain technology works, and meet different STEM professionals to gain a better understanding of the different careers that make our everyday technologies (like Alexa or Amazon delivery) possible.
Amazon Future Engineer Tech Tours
Abstract
Resource overview
Websites: www.amazonfutureenginer.com/space, www.amazonfutureengineer.com/fctours
Tech Tours are available on Kahoot!, a game-based learning platform where students can watch videos and interact by answering trivia questions. Teachers can host the interactive tours in class. Students watch short videos and participate in interactive polls and trivia questions. These questions are dispersed between each video to keep students engaged and to review new vocabulary and concepts from the tour. Each Tech Tour comes with a "Teacher Toolkit" that includes a lesson plan, worksheet, and resource documents to help teachers facilitate the tour in class. Each tour takes about 50 minutes to complete. After the tour, teachers can hand out completion certificates and/or guide students in provided extension activities.
On the Amazon Fulfillment Center Tour, students learn how computer science, robotics, and people work together to pick, pack, and ship customer orders. Along the way, students are introduced to computer science concepts such as algorithms and machine learning while learning about careers in software engineering, hardware engineering, and systems engineering. Teachers and students can choose from an Elementary Tour (Grades K-5 – ages 4-11) or Secondary Tour (Grades 6+ - ages 12+).
The Callisto: Space Innovation Tour takes students behind the scene of deep space technology that flew onboard NASA’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft, including voice artificial intelligence with Amazon’s Alexa. Students meet engineers from Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and WebEx while learning about concepts such as voice artificial intelligence and telemetry.
Teachers can choose between hosting a tour, where it is projected and students join using their own devices, or assigning the tour to students to complete independently. The tours are a mix of video content, trivia questions to identify what students may already know, and review questions to reinforce student learnings.
Description of technology
Tech Tours are hosted on the education platform Kahoot! Amazon created videos and adds them to their gamified presentation system to enable students to interact between videos.
How the resource makes career guidance more effective, efficient and/or equitable for students
Tech Tours differentiates from existing virtual field trips, career-related learning programs, and educational videos in six key ways:
Phenomena-based – Amazon Future Engineer Tech Tours do not teach careers in isolation but through exploring phenomena, i.e., the processes or products they create.
Gamified – The interactive format keeps students engaged as they compete on trivia throughout each episode.
Career-focused – Each tour is designed to strengthen student awareness and understanding of a focus career.
OnDemand – Tours are available online at any time for anyone. This supports bell schedules and packed evening agendas.
Aligned to standards – Each tour addresses the standards teachers already need to teach (e.g. CCSS, NGSS, CSTA).
Free – Tech Tours will always remain free and available to all. No paid subscription required.
Challenges or potential barriers to use
Schools need Wi-Fi, a teacher's computer, a projector, and ideally student devices to interact. Teachers need to set up a basic (free) account with Kahoot! in order to host the tour to a group of students.
The resource is free of charge.
Additional details
This resource has been endorsed by South Allegheny School District in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in the United States.
Disclaimer: This content is provided by the submitting organisation.
