2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Competing with smartphones, video games, social media, and Discord for the attention of 12–14-year-old students is not an easy feat for an engineering program. Students from historically excluded backgrounds (economic, racial, or ethnic) are acutely aware of how traditional school environments and engineering programs label them as “at-risk” or academically deficient because they lack the same lived experiences and resources as dominant groups. Yet, culturally diverse students bring a plethora of experiences, skills, and strengths and are aware of the needs of their communities. As a counter-narrative, we use an asset-based community approach to form partnerships between a tier-one university, K-12 schools, teachers, and parents to foster middle school students’ interests in engineering. This paper evaluates the community approach of Introduction to Research and Innovative Design in Engineering (iRIDE), an after-school extra-curricular club followed by a summer academy, with two guiding questions: 1. How are student participants’ voices utilized to align engineering activities with their grade-level curriculum and future career plans? and 2. How do the facilitators engage the students in program activities to ensure a community-based approach?
Participation in the program was open to all 6th-8th grade students from selected schools irrespective of their background knowledge. Each year (from 2019-2022, excluding 2020), approximately 30 students from three middle schools participated. This study constituted multi-year student and facilitator input using a non-experimental approach: 40 student participants provided qualitative feedback via Google Forms, while the facilitators participated in semi-structured interviews at the end of the summer. Using a grounded theory approach, we evaluated the program to better comprehend its potential influence on the students in instilling the desire to pursue engineering to solve community problems, identify students' level of engagement in activities, and communicate the program's successes and challenges. We found that the summer hands-on Capstone Project allowed students to bring in their lived experiences to collaboratively determine problems in their community, brainstorm and develop solutions, and present their findings to community stakeholders, including parents and teachers. Through this experience and extensive facilitator and peer support, the students realized that "engineering is for everyone no matter their background." The program’s curriculum sparked an interest in future engineering careers by teaching students that "engineering is fun" and through the hands-on activities, they "learned to have grit" while working with students from comparable backgrounds. Facilitators modified activities based on students' engagement and recognized that students feel more comfortable learning from mistakes when there is less emphasis on marks. Thus, these practical insights can provide others with information to lead projects with similar community-focused strategies to make lasting impacts on students' engineering trajectories.