EAGER: MAKER: Maker Fridays: Engaging Rural and Underrepresented High School Students in Pre-Engineering Design and Creativity

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There is a continued need to increase the number and diversity of students who pursue and complete engineering degrees to meet current and future national workforce needs. The engineering field struggles to develop sufficient interest and sustained participation across underrepresented demographic groups including women and individuals from rural, Hispanic, or Native American origin. This project addresses the shortage of diverse students entering into engineering fields by developing a course to engage rural and underrepresented high school students in maker design and creativity and to determine best practices that attract and retain these students. It is critical to foster interest in engineering during formative years when students are deciding career paths. The College created a Fridays@Northeast program that targets high school seniors, offering them the opportunity to learn from College faculty in Northeast lab spaces and classrooms to earn early college credit. Using this platform, a Pre-Engineering Multidisciplinary Design course augmented with the incorporation of a maker design area is taught at two of the community college's campuses to high school students. A maker design area outfitted with a set of prototype and model development tools and equipment allows the students to conduct activities that increase problem-solving and creativity while the course dispels misconceptions and transforms careers in engineering into a tangible and viable option. Variability in the student diversity between the campuses, such as racial, ethnic, or rural/metropolitan origin, facilitates educational research to develop a theoretical explanation for the development of interest in engineering careers for students from diverse backgrounds. Researchers are investigating how the activities increase problem-solving and creativity experiences, and how they influence diverse high school student postsecondary career pathway selection into engineering and STEM related careers.This project addresses the shortage of diverse students entering into engineering fields by creating a course that engages rural and underrepresented high school students in maker design and creativity and determines the best practices that attract and retain these students. The high school students are provided learning activities and career exploration that help them understand engineering design and creativity while earning college credit. Educational researchers work with instructors to collect data through a multi-phase mixed methods design to develop a theoretical explanation for the development of interest in engineering careers for students from diverse backgrounds. They collect baseline and relevant continuing data on student background, academic preparation, engineering perceptions, career interests, course engagement, and overall student experiences. This is accomplished through a combination of student assessments, interest inventories, recorded class sessions reviews, and in-person class visits. This research will create a theoretical explanation for the development of interest in engineering careers for students from underrepresented demographic groups including women and individuals from rural, Hispanic, or Native American origin. The theoretical models derived by the project will be shared in state-wide education conferences and nationally to secondary schools, post-secondary institutions, and industry at National Science Teachers Association and American Society for Engineering Education conferences. In addition, project materials including curriculum, technical reports, and de-identified linked supporting data will be shared with the larger STEM community at the University of Nebraska Lincoln's Digital Commons open access repository. To preserve data access, the de-identified dataset and study codebook will be submitted to the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan as public-use data files and will subsequently be created into substantive metadata. Overall, this project supports exploratory work on untested, but potentially transformative research that will create a theoretical explanation for the development of interest in engineering careers for students from underrepresented demographic groups and will advance understanding of the professional formation of engineers.