Information for Parents/Guardians

The Junior Engineer Development Initiative (JEDI) programme is a primary school programme designed to improve children’s engineering skills, their understanding of the attributes needed to be an engineer, and to debunk stereotype myths relating to engineering.

The JEDI programme has been designed by researchers from University College Dublin (UCD), the Institute of Education Dublin City University (DCU), Technological University of the Shannon, and the University of Surrey. It is funded by Research Ireland and the Department of Education.

If your child’s school has agreed to be part of the JEDI study you can find more about what the study involves below.

If your child is in a participating class of a participating school, you will receive an email with information about the JEDI programme. The JEDI programme will take place during the normal school day and the content of the programme aligns with the primary school curriculum. Therefore, if your child’s school has agreed, they will complete the JEDI programme as part of their normal schooling.

However, participation in the evaluation/research component of this project is voluntary. You and your child are under no obligation to participate, and if you choose not to take part, there will be no negative consequences.

If you agree, you will be asked to complete a short consent form, along with a brief background questionnaire about your child and yourself (e.g., child’s age, language spoken at home, parents career). This will take approximately five minutes to complete.

Your child will then take part in the JEDI programme which includes four one-hour classroom sessions delivered by their teacher. These include fun, structured activities designed to develop engineering skills, creativity, spatial thinking, and problem-solving. In one of these sessions, an engineer will visit your child’s class to talk about their work and guide the children through an age-appropriate activity. Your child will complete an evaluation worksheet before and after the JEDI programme including questions about engineering and their views of engineers and the work they do.

It is not possible to provide individual results for any child. All data collected will be anonymised and your child’s response will not be used to assess or grade them in any way.

We anticipate that your child will enjoy taking part in the programme as the activities are fun and enjoyable. We also hope it will increase their understanding of engineering and the different careers that engineers pursue. We will also provide an overall summary of the project findings at the end of the study for you and your child’s school.

The researchers leading this study are from University College Dublin (UCD), the Institute of Education Dublin City University (DCU), and the Technological University of the Shannon. More information about the researchers can be found on our Team page. The project is funded by Research Ireland and the Department of Education. This research study has been granted ethical approval by the UCD Human Research Ethics Committee. All researchers working with schools or child data have completed Garda vetting checks.

All data collected will be anonymised and used to answer research questions about the efficacy of the JEDI programme. The findings may be published in academic journals or presented at research events. Anonymised data will be shared on a secure online repository called the Open Science Framework. However, neither you nor your child will be identifiable in this shared data set.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Nicola Broderick at nicola.broderick@dcu.ie.