Women make up only 28% of the workforce in STEM fields. It’s important to engage more girls in learning STEM; however, girls’ interests in STEM careers keep declining. It is well studied that the lack of sense of belonging underlies gender differences in STEM differentiation and achievement. Researchers have found that secondary girls’ sense of belonging declines as they age. To enhance secondary female students’ interests and self-concept in computing and engineering fields, the UNLV ITEST project sets the focus on engaging Girls in Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (GUIC) through a constructivist learning environment. In the GUIC Summer Camp, 40 secondary female students will take three-week training courses in Arduino & Internet of Things and Robotics Design and conduct two-week engineering project development in tiered teams co-mentored by STEM teachers and college student mentors. Based on the active learning method, the training courses are designed with interactive lectures and hands-on labs/activities. The engineering projects in ubiquitous intelligent systems are designed to connect computing & engineering concepts with real-world problems. Project demo results and students’ feedbacks have confirmed the effectiveness of the project activities in enhancing female students’ interests and self-efficacy in learning engineering and STEM. The unique constructivist learning environment is helpful in improving female students’ sense of belonging in STEM.
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Implementing design thinking into summer camp experience for high school women in materials science and engineering.
Although women make up a significant portion of the college educated population, there remains a sizable gap between the number of men and women pursuing degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. This gender gap begins at middle school and widens considerably in the later high school years. One major factor for this gap is the lack of belonging women can feel towards engineering. As one approach to developing and improving this sense of belonging, we focused on improving students’ comprehension of engineering topics during a weeklong materials science and engineering summer camp for high school girls. We took a two-prong approach: a unifying paradigm and a design project. The purpose of this was to allow for transfer of learning throughout the week, allowing the students to build and showcase their own comprehension. The paradigm, the materials science tetrahedron, provided cohesion throughout an otherwise broad and seemingly disconnected field, while the design project allowed for the students to implement what they learned during the week in a group setting. This approach concomitantly enhances confidence and their sense of belonging within engineering. In this paper we highlight lessons learned from incorporating this approach into our program, including our perception of its effectiveness and feedback from the girls. The preliminary results from this work show that this summer camp is a unique and well-suited opportunity to study how comprehension can engender a sense of belonging amongst female students with the ultimate goal of closing the gender gap in engineering fields.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1654182
- PAR ID:
- 10058063
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1524-4644
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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