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Abstract To help foster interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), it is important to develop opportunities that excite and teach young minds about STEM-related fields. Over the past several years, our university-based research group has sought to help grow excitement around the biomechanics and biomedical engineering fields. The purposes of this technical brief are to (1) discuss the development of a partnership built between a St. Louis area high school and biomechanics research lab and (2) provide practical guidance for other researchers looking to implement a long-term outreach program. The partnership uses three different outreach opportunities. The first opportunity consisted of 12th-grade students visiting university research labs for an up-close perspective of ongoing biomedical research. The second opportunity was a biomedical research showcase where research-active graduate students traveled to the high school to perform demonstrations. The third opportunity consisted of a collaborative capstone project where a high school student was able to carry out research directly in a university lab. To date, we have expanded our reach from 19 students to interacting with over 100 students, which has yielded increased interest in STEM related research. Our postprogram survey showed that outreach programs such as the one described herein can increase interest in STEM within all ages of high school students. Building partnerships between high schools and university researchers increases the interest in STEM amongst high school students, and gives graduate students an outlet to present work to an eager-to-learn audience.
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This content will become publicly available on February 17, 2026
Individual Showcase: What do high school students experience and learn during a two-day datathon?
What do high school students learn from a two-day datathon during which they tackle data to visualize the impact of biased data on healthcare decisions? How do they interact with their team of high school students, data scientists, clinicians, and teachers? What did we, the developers and leaders of the datathon, learn? How would we approach it differently next year? Our goal is to answer these questions plus share lessons learned. We will then divide the audience into teams to brainstorm ways to approach and solve some of the problems we experienced and hopefully recruit some audience members to participate in our June 2025 Brown University Health Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems Thinking for Equity (HASTE) Datathon in Providence, Rhode Island (Brown University Datathon, 2024).
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- Award ID(s):
- 2148451
- PAR ID:
- 10610168
- Publisher / Repository:
- Data Science for Everyone
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- San Antonio, TX
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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