2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an estimated 1.1 million new STEM jobs are expected to be created between 2023 and 2033. Filling these needs will rely on a STEM-educated populace, specifically with K-12 students being exposed to science and engineering early and often. There are challenges to achieving increased STEM education, including students' lack of STEM identity, the need for pre-college programs, and teachers who can provide engaging, robust lessons to their students. The Outreach Design Education (ODE) Program focuses on promoting STEM for middle and high school students through engineering design. One major aspect of our efforts is our collaboration with teachers to create engineering-design-centric classroom lessons. Each summer, we partner with 2-4 local Grades 6-12 teachers to introduce them to an engineering design process. We then collaborate with the teachers to determine how to best integrate the lessons into their classrooms, resulting in instructional content that harmonizes with their existing approaches. Teachers implement engineering design lessons in the subsequent academic year.

This paper presents the development, implementation, and evaluation of engineering design curricula for middle and high school classrooms. In addition to developing and implementing this content, we assess teachers’ and students’ self-perceptions of how engineering design content impacts knowledge and identity. As a result of this effort, we introduced engineering design to four (4) local middle and high schools, impacting over 150 students from Title I schools. By sharing our collaborative model and classroom-tested lessons, we aim to expand access to pre-college engineering education and foster deeper partnerships between university educators and local teachers.