Hk Maker Lab 2.0: Inspiring Engineering Design Thinking in Grades 6 - 12 Students and Teacher

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PROJECT SUMMARY Disparities persist in STEM fields for underrepresented minority and economically disadvantaged students despite the emergence of many formal and informal interventions. STEM identity – one’s view of themself as a scientist or engineer – plays a crucial role in students’ motivations to pursue STEM education and careers. Identity is particularly important for minorities and girls in middle school (Grades 6 – 8). Providing middle school students with project-based experiences that challenge them to employ STEM thinking and practices are essential in STEM identity development. The burden for creating these opportunities falls largely on teachers, who often feel ill-equipped to impart these concepts, especially in teaching engineering and engineering design, areas of emphasis in the widely-adopted Next Generation Science Standards. This is unfortunate because engineering design is an exciting entry point for STEM that involves inquiry, project-based learning, and the application of technical skills and knowledge to real-world problems. The Hk Maker Lab has provided engineering design-centric education to hundreds of high school students throughout New York City and has prepared teachers to teach engineering design and incorporate design thinking into their practice. We are now ready to extend our efforts to middle school students and teachers to further propel underrepresented minority students towards STEM opportunities at a crucial juncture in their educational journeys. The Specific Aims of the proposed program are to: I. Provide early engineering education opportunities to middle school students via Design Hackathons that will take place throughout the academic year in addition to continuing the annual Hk Maker Lab Summer Design Camp for high school students. II. Expand the Hk Maker Lab teacher training to middle school teachers to develop their engineering design knowledge and self-efficacy such that they can integrate design into their instruction. III. Cultivate a cohort of master ‘Teachineers’ who are highly adept in engineering design thinking and instruction, and can teach design thinking to other teachers via professional development workshops. The Hk Maker Lab will give both teachers and students hands-on design experiences. The student participants will have the opportunity to engineer solutions to problems. Working with middle school students will create a positive STEM trajectory that will result in increased diversity in the field. The participating teachers will receive an innovative training experience, which they can subsequently use to integrate engineering design into their school curricula. Finally, by empowering teachers to teach their colleagues, we will be able to scale these efforts to a wider range of students and teachers, increasing the impact of our engineering design training and supporting the creation of a diverse STEM education and professional community.