2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

For many years, K-12 outreach in {University}’s College of Engineering existed in silos: departments and organizations operated independently of each other, overlapping only when additional support was needed for the execution of large-scale outreach events. Collaboration never occurred at the planning stage, meaning that faculty, staff, and students interested in outreach had to navigate roadblocks to engage in meaningful outreach with K-12 populations. A change of leadership and operating philosophy in 2019 brought about a reorganization of priorities and allowed the authors of this paper the ability to create a new vision of outreach for the college of engineering. In this paper, we will elaborate on how we moved from our silos to a purposeful system of outreach that has allowed us to expand our outreach into student ambassadors, service learning coursework, free pre-college lessons, and more that others can use to help drive change in their units.

Utilizing a systems-view allows a standardization of activities and can eliminate wasted time and effort spent reinventing the wheel for every activity. Organizations have utilized systems-thinking to successfully operate and improve activities, building synergies and creating innovative techniques to achieve greater goals. We have leveraged this concept for our outreach activities, by collaborating across the system and state, and immediately saw greater involvement from our college students, increased engagement with K-12 populations and improved outcomes (e.g. new school partnerships, new grant funding, new variety of events).

One way that we leveraged our new system was to structure our outreach subcommittee as a one-stop for outreach requests: requests sent to one member were forwarded to everyone, so that events could be shared between departments and units. Additionally, the existence of the subcommittee gave a point-of-contact for referrals from college faculty and staff.

Once we began to streamline and work together, we were able to leverage existing opportunities and build our programs. {Named redacted}, a service learning course focused on engineering education in K-12, partnered with the STEM nights and other outreach initiatives that previously ran through departments or centers. This gave students the opportunity to develop lessons in their class then take them to local schools, afterschool programs, or other out-of-school-time events. For example, in Spring 2021 the students in {name redacted} hosted a Virtual STEM night for students from local elementary schools. Supply kits were provided to the students at the schools and families logged on to Microsoft Teams to watch undergraduates demonstrate activities like how to make a lava lamp using food coloring, cooking oil, water, and alka seltzer tablets. The event was a huge success, and many of the activities were used again in our subscription box summer program and at STEM nights the following year. Additional activities from that class have been used at another local elementary school’s afterschool program and in the {redacted} internal grant which sent subscription box activities to middle school clubs and 4-H groups.