2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An interdisciplinary team of two faculty and four undergraduate students at two mid-sized public universities recently completed a one-semester project called Designing Equitable _(redacted for anonymity)_ STEM Education with Renewable Energy Technologies _(program acronym redacted for anonymity)_. The focus of the project was to design renewable energy-focused STEM education activities that could be implemented at the middle school or high school level, while keeping equity as a primary objective in the lesson plan design. The project began by establishing a common understanding of what equity looks like in educational coursework. To do so, the team started the conceptual design process by conducting a literature review of STEM curriculum and educational frameworks that exemplified equity-focused approaches. The group found that developing empathy for other communities is a common theme among curriculum that are designed with equity in mind. In addition, STEM literacy and the integration of multiple STEM areas were common themes.
The teams from _(redacted)_ University and _(redacted)_ University met twice in-person and once via Zoom during the semester. The purpose of the first in-person meeting was to discuss the goals of the project and brainstorm ideas. The teams then continued independently brainstorming renewable energy-related activity ideas that could be performed by middle and high school students in a typical 50-minute class period. After brainstorming several dozen ideas and building functional prototypes of several, the groups settled on two platforms. The group at _(redacted)_ University decided to build lab activities centered around energy storage with pumped hydroelectricity as the primary focus. The group at _(redacted)_ University decided to build lab activities around thermal energy, with energy efficiency and heat loss as the primary focus.
Each team created two classroom sets of equipment necessary to perform the labs. At the second in-person meeting, the teams performed the lab activities that the other group designed, and provided feedback to improve the written curricular materials. The teams then exchanged one classroom set of equipment, so that each university had one classroom set of each lab activity. The materials will now be placed into a STEM lending library maintained at each university. The lab activities have been piloted with one high school science class thus far. Feedback and assessment results from this pilot implementation will be discussed in the paper.
The _(project name)_ project had benefits for numerous groups. Through their participation in the project, the undergraduate students gained outreach experiences and an understanding of the societal and contextual factors that constrain STEM opportunities for students from underrepresented groups. By performing the lessons that were created, middle and high school students from diverse populations will gain an increased understanding, appreciation, and confidence around renewable energy STEM topics, perhaps guiding them to pursue STEM fields in their post-secondary education.