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Students act as civil engineers and use the engineering design process to design and construct a building in an earthquake-prone area for a local developer. Students will have to make decisions on how many materials they use, because they will have a budget to meet. The building materials will include spaghetti noodles, toothpicks, flexible straws, marshmallows, and hot glue. They will also have to construct a building with specific size constraints and that can withstand a 2.5 lb. weight being placed on top of it. After construction, their building with the weight will be placed on a shake table. Students will measure the time their building remains standing during the earthquake. Students will review where their building first collapsed and redesign their building to try to make it last longer in a second earthquake. Finally, each group will use all of their information to develop a presentation of their results for the developer in hopes of winning the bid. 

Students act as environmental engineers to solve a problem using carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from cars and wildfires. Wildfires are a timely topic because every year they cause people in many areas to face poor air quality. Students use Microsoft Excel to investigate CO2 emitted from two sources: highway traffic and forest fires. They estimate and graph the CO2 emitted by forest fires and from U.S. highway driving annually from 2004 to 2021. After they analyze these two pieces of data, they analyze a specific fire and evacuation that happened in Saratoga Springs in June 2020, named the Knolls Fire. Finally, using the Excel data and the Knolls Fire data, students decide whether the U.S. should spend money on reducing the number and severity of wildfires, or on reducing CO2 emissions from driving cars. The students design and create a poster based on their decision and present it to the class. 

Students learn how seasonal flooding from snowmelt affects rivers and evaluate how changing environmental conditions, such as flood levels and temperatures, influence the distribution and abundance of organisms such as mosquitoes. In this hands-on activity, students build a river model using stream tables to explore the factors that affect water flow and velocity. Using what they learn, students predict how flooding impacts mosquito populations. Finally, they develop a vector control strategy to reduce mosquito populations and help prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. 

Students act as civil engineers who are assessing the viability of a new housing development along a river. Students use a map of the river and the location of the proposed development to demonstrate where erosion and deposition are occurring along the river. They interpret precipitation data to determine whether flooding will occur. Finally, they create a presentation that includes the best course of action for the city and any flood mitigation strategies necessary. 

Through funding from the National Science Foundation to create a Research Experience for Teachers site at North Dakota State University, the authors provided summer research experiences to current secondary (6th to 12th grade) educators to improve their understanding of the civil engineering field and develop new curriculum modules for their classrooms. Reflection of the first summer program in 2021 highlighted several modifications that could be made to improve the quality of the program and curriculum developed, increase the accessibility to underserved and/or underrepresented populations and to better utilize the limited resources available. This paper summarizes the successes of the RET program and provides several concrete recommendations for future programs. Specifically, recruiting of both teachers and faculty could be more effective when personal communications through known contacts are used. Flexibility in the approach without compromising rigor and expectations allows for a more inclusive program that supports underserved and marginalized populations. 

A new Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site was established in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Dakota State University (NDSU) with funding from the National Science Foundation Division of Engineering Education and Centers (NSF Award #1953102). The site focused on civil engineering instruction around the theme of mitigating natural disasters for secondary education (6th to 12th grade) teachers. Eight local teachers and one pre-service teacher (who comprised the first cohort) were provided with a six-week long authentic research experience during the summer, which they translated into a hands-on curriculum for their classrooms during the 2021-2022 academic year. Partnerships were developed between the host institution, area teachers and local partners from civil engineering industries. This paper will summarize the lessons learned by the authors as well as the effectiveness of the program activities to accomplish two objectives: (1) provide a deeper understanding of civil engineering and (2) develop better abilities among secondary education teachers to prepare future science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leaders. Several strengths were identified by the authors as they reflected on the summer activities including the successes in creating strong connections between the teachers, faculty members and graduate students, and the industry partners as well as the agility of the core research team to overcome unexpected challenges. However, the reflections also revealed several areas for improvement that would increase the accessibility of the site to underserved and/or underrepresented teacher populations, better utilize the resources available and in general, improve the quality of the program and curriculum developed by the teachers. Included within this paper are suggestions that the authors would make to improve current and future RET sites. All of the teachers agreed or strongly agreed that their participation in the RET program increased their knowledge of STEM topics and specifically, civil engineering topics. The participants agreed to varying extents that they will use the information they learned from the program to teach their students and will implement the new strategies they gained to promote increased student learning about STEM topics. Furthermore, the feedback that they provided corroborated some of the same changes the authors plan to implement.