2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper, we share two years of findings from a five-year research project situated in youth-led afterschool STEM clubs. Using a design-based research approach, we examine how these technology-rich learning environments function as both sites of possibility and sites of struggle, where youth negotiate belonging, leadership, and ethical responsibility while engaging with engineering and technology. Integrating engineering education into informal settings for young learners can support students’ agency and engagement with STEM. Low-stakes, playful, and informal settings are also opportune spaces for students to temporarily develop a sense of belonging to the space and community, which can support a long-term sense of belonging in STEM. Our study is guided by a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) approach, and here we share our work with STEM after-school programs at two different schools over the last two years. In these programs, middle school students are leaders, activity designers, and peer researchers. In this paper, we explore how youth leaders, across two years of implementation, including weekday in-school design meetings in year one and twelve Saturday design and research sessions with corresponding Monday afterschool STEM club sessions for year two, foster a sense of belonging, equip peers to recognize and act upon ethical considerations, and build community through leadership roles and collaborative artifacts. During the Saturday sessions, the university researcher team worked with middle school researchers to discuss community-identified problems, develop facilitation for in-school peers, and learn prototyping technologies such as 3D printing, circuits, microcontrollers, e-textiles, and laser cutting. The workshops also discussed and critiqued normalized practices in STEM and education. During the Monday after-school STEM sessions, youth leaders facilitated the same activities for their peers at their respective schools. Our data collection approaches included interviews, video recordings, youth-created artifacts, observations, researcher audit trails, and reflections. We analyzed this data qualitatively using a thematic analysis to identify and categorize patterns and answer our larger research questions for this multi-year study: How and in what ways can youth experience belonging in engineering when working in technology-rich spaces? How and in what ways can youth be motivated to prevent harm to people and the environment when engaging in technology-rich engineering activities? How do youth lead the development and maintenance of a technology-rich engineering space? This paper does not report on the complete YPAR approach, which will be shared in forthcoming work, but instead presents a narrative analysis that surfaces insights into the tensions, negotiations, and identities the youth researchers and participants experienced. Our work demonstrates the potential of such approaches in afterschool STEM clubs to position youth as knowledge producers who view engineering as both a technical and human discipline.