2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a WIP paper on STEM outreach in civil engineering. Civil Engineering as a career is in high demand to cater for our ailing infrastructure and design for a sustainable and innovative future. Students who are exposed to STEM before college have a greater chance of selecting engineering as a major, and that visits to engineering schools had an impact of the students’ decision to enter engineering.

We designed an immersive STEM outreach project based on a civil engineering core statics course application centering on one of the largest infrastructures investments in national history: the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Initially designed to connect major cities in the US, enhance national security and help grow the economy, the highways built within the city limits were purposefully routed though under-represented minoritized communities. This led to the destruction of many thriving neighborhoods, notably the Jefferson Street community in Nashville, TN. Currently, a national effort to alleviate the effects of the Highway Act is driving the design of many interstate caps to reconnect the severed communities.

In this paper, we explore the effect of this immersive project on a group of 23 juniors in high school. This cohort of students from different local public schools is part of a program run by the SSMV (School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt) to encourage students with interest in science and math to pursue STEM careers. Once a week for 4-weeks, students researched the Highway Act, studied the history of Jefferson Street, and used a novel ideation technique to design innovative and inclusive prototype bridges. This technique generated much curiosity in the students with respect to civil engineering, encouraging them to create connections with the community, and designing a product that showcases the community’s values. All these follow the KEEN’s definition of entrepreneurial mindset learning. They used tool kits provided by the author to shape the Balsa. Students learned how to calculate reactions for varying loads on the bridge, using basic mathematics and physics knowledge of forces and equilibrium. They also used an open-source truss simulator to draw their bridges and see the how loads transmit through a structure. At the end of their 4th session, students presented their ideation process along with their designs to their peers, and a group of educators from the community.
Surveys were conducted at the end of each of the four sessions to track students’ growth during this project. Many students noted how this hands-on application helped them tie engineering with math they learned at school. Some shared that this spiked their interest in civil engineering.
In the spring of 2025, a cohort of 80 8th graders will be doing this immersive project. Qualitative data will be collected, similarly to the pilot project. We will compare how STEM oriented high schoolers compare to the general 8th grade population with regards to immersive STEM projects. We will be comparing both groups’ math curriculum to study how that affects their outlook of STEM, and whether it encourages or discourages students from pursuing STEM careers.