2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Prior work in engineering education has suggested that creating technology-rich spaces, such as makerspaces, for traditionally underserved youth will help increase access to and participation in engineering. However, simply creating these spaces is not sufficient to foster feelings of ownership over the space or promote belonging within the space or engineering itself. Further, these spaces do not focus on reducing harm to communities and the environment in engineering work, which, based on prior research, may help youth foster connections with engineering. Therefore, our work aims to create a youth-centered, technology-rich environment to further feelings of belonging for underserved youth while promoting a value of reducing harm in engineering.This paper focuses on a harm reduction in engineering activity that is part of a ten-week workshop within an after-school program assisting youth from resettled families with refugee and migrant experience in the United States Northeast. The workshop aimed to utilize the makerspace and youth-led teams to introduce youth to harm reduction and have them complete an activity in which they could apply harm reduction principles and build a physical prototype. We evaluate the youths' responses to the introduction to harm reduction presentation, team dynamics while designing and building, and finally the physical prototype and justification of design to understand how youth conceptualize harm reduction. We hope that continued study of harm reduction in a K-12 setting will lead to a successful framework of implementing harm reduction in engineering education.