2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Informal STEM experiences have been identified as a critical element of the development of future scientists and engineers, who are needed to meet the growing technical demands of our society. However, the landscape of informal experiences irrevocably changed following the COVID-19 pandemic, as many opportunities for informal STEM experiences were forced online. The movement of these traditionally hands-on experiences online brought both challenges in implementation and opportunities for broadening access.

This paper provides recommendations for virtual informal STEM experiences based on a Girl Scout engineering badge experience which moved to a virtual environment following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The recommendations were developed from data gathered while transitioning the program online. Participant outcomes from the study are also included to provide additional details about the experience. Participant interviews and activity observations were analyzed to develop recommendations. Interviews and observations were analyzed to understand how choices made during the transition impacted participant’s experiences and outcomes. Additionally, facilitator debriefs occurred after each participant interaction and were used to identify areas for improvement and develop recommendations. The recommendations generated from the analysis focus on how to transition an informal engineering experience into a completely virtual or hybrid environment.

The recommendations developed from this study include: 1.) Carefully craft your learning environment for participant success, 2.) Be flexible and adapt activities as needed, 3.) Create a supportive environment where struggle and failure are okay and 4.) Leverage your network to develop relationships with organizations you wish to partner with. These recommendations can be used to support engineering educators as they seek to transition historically in-person informal STEM experiences into virtual experiences and create new virtual experiences to broader participation. Virtual experiences can help expand access to engineering by creating programs which are accessible to participants who do not have these types of experiences available to them locally and are unable to travel to participate.