2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In recent years there has been a movement to increase accessibility to technology-rich environments like makerspaces for traditionally underserved youth in engineering. Several pro-Makerspace actors purport that having experiences in such open-ended project-based settings can encourage engagement with engineering. However, as we know from prior work in the area, simply providing access to technology-rich spaces does not allow underserved youth to feel ownership and belonging in both makerspaces and engineering environments. Additionally, formal and informal engineering education experiences do not center preventing harm to communities and the environment in engineering work. Not only do future generations of engineers need to reduce the harm caused by engineering and technology proactively, but harm reduction also offers authentic real-world applications to engineering problems that may create a more human-centered approach to addressing problems within communities.

To this end, we propose integrating youth as leaders in technology-rich environments to encourage further feelings of belonging in engineering and promote harm reduction in the field. The role of youth leaders in the program is to collaborate with our project team leaders in creating and facilitating the program curriculum. In sharing ownership of the project, we hope to further the sense of belonging and solve community-based issues. This program is currently being implemented in a ten-week workshop within an afterschool program assisting youth from resettled families with refugee and migrant experience in the United States Northeast. The youth are aged between 8 to over 18 years old. The workshop is structured into 10 total meetings, with sections broken down into: introduction to engineering tools, introduction to harm reduction in engineering, convergence and divergence in prototyping, and ending with a celebration of the final design. The overall study aims to explore how the implementation of youth leadership in technology-rich spaces may: 1) support youth in leading explorations of how technology use and creation can support a sense of belonging in engineering; 2) further develop a framework to center preventing harm to people and the environment along with youth; 3) explore the role that intergenerational relationships can play in informal student learning. Our data sources include first-person narratives from the youth, equity conjecture maps, and artifacts created during the program.