2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A few years ago, we initiated a project with the goal of engaging kids and their caregivers in engineering with two goals: (1) increasing the awareness of kids and caregivers as to what engineering is, and (2) increasing kids’ interest in engineering. We focused on caregivers and at-home environments because we knew from prior research (Authors) that caregivers and at-home experiences with STEM played an important role in triggering interest for many individuals who end up in STEM. One approach we pursued was the creation and distribution of kits to families who wanted to engage in STEM. Each kit has a challenge for users to address and involves different types of engineering-related content (e.g., circuits, construction) (Authors). We viewed the kits as an enrichment component that could either spark families’ initial interest or sustain existing interest in STEM.
To increase impact, we thought that partnering with our local library could be mutually beneficial. This would help us as libraries have existing infrastructure for kit distribution and programming that attracts and supports families regardless of their participation in public education or background. We felt the libraries would benefit from distributing our ready-made kits to local families looking for STEM content.
We worked with our local library before, but they were initially hesitant to engage with us on this due to the logistics of kit circulation and concerns with how kits would fit within their existing structure. After months of conversation, we agreed to offer the kits during their annual summer reading challenge. To allay the library’s concerns, we came up with a plan for plugging into their existing activity registration system to sign families up and their main branch for distribution. Our team responded to all inquiries from the participants, provided an online Q&A session every week, and replaced used materials in kits. The library maintained control over registration and communication with families (e.g., they sent out emails), including all personal identifying information, which limited us in some ways in terms of research and follow-up.
We offered four separate kits as part of this experiment: Roller Coaster, Squishy Circuits, Trendy Tennies, and Watercolor Bots. We will share materials for these within the presentation sessions. Registration was opened for each kit individually to reduce the likelihood that families would sign up for all four at one time. Registration was capped at 35 per kit, and all slots were filled within a short time.
In this paper we discuss lessons learned from our attempts to get our local library to be a partner in offering engineering challenges to the community, eventually resulting in the Summer Engineering Challenges. One of our main conclusions is that, while on the surface it may seem that forming partnerships with other organizations with a synergistic focus will be easy, there are a lot of factors to consider. As such, we conclude that simply providing an "add-on" activity to an existing program likely will not be successful. Our work is one example of what it takes to collaborate with a library to provide STEM kits and experiences to families, and we feel that we had moderate success in doing so in our first iteration.