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This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents findings on the impact of framing Engineering as a prosocial career on high school students’ engineering identity formation. Engineers are often stereotyped as people who work alone and are primarily motivated by financial rewards. This stereotype may deter students who value altruism from pursuing engineering career pathways. In reality, many engineers work in collaborative, creative, interdisciplinary fields on problems that positively affect society. This work examined the impacts of framing engineering as altruistic on the engineering identity development of low socioeconomic status, predominantly Black high school students in an urban region of the Southern United States. The program consisted of a summer camp and academic year activities that included mentoring from underrepresented minority undergraduate engineering students. The program content was aligned to the US National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges for Engineering (GCEs), a list of 14 critical challenges that society faces that will require engineering solutions to address. Each of these challenges highlights the exciting ways that a career in engineering allows students to serve their communities and improve the lives of others. A convergent, mixed-methods approach was used to understand how this program affected students’ perceptions of and interest in engineering. These results were compared to those for a traditional STEM Saturday informal education program with participants from the same demographic group. The altruistic framing resulted in students’ having a broader definition of engineering as well as increased interest in engineering as a potential career. 

Highlighting the role engineers have in solving community and global challenges has been shown to positively affect students' engineering identity development. Poor water quality and water scarcity have been recognized as a critical global issue by many organizations, including the United Nations. Students of all ages can relate to the importance of having drinkable water through their experiences with thirst, drought, floods, news stories, or just accidentally swallowing salt water while on holiday at a beach. This talk describes the development and implementation of a series of engineering education activities focused on water quality. These activities ranged from three-minute activities for community outreach events to week-long lessons for engineering freshmen. Younger students were able to readily recognize how using different types of filters and natural media can increase the clarity of water with particulate or color contamination. Middle and high school students were able to design and test filter set-ups and learn about the role of nanotechnology in water purification. They also developed analytical and data analysis skills through qualitative and quantitative water quality measurements. Freshman engineering students learned about the water industry, local and global water issues, and performed water quality sampling around their campuses using portable meters that log data via a cell phone app. The activities and results were then used to meet university-course outcomes related to the societal impacts of engineering, statistical analysis, plotting data, and written communication. By centering learning on a tangible and important engineering challenge, this work provides a flexible framework for learning and problem solving that can be tailored to the needs of students from different age groups and for different learning outcomes. 

Engineering‐oriented bridge programs and camps are popular strategies for broadening participation. The students who often serve as counselors and mentors in these programs are integral to their success.

Predicated on the belief that mentoring contributes to positive outcomes for the mentors themselves, we sought to understand how undergraduate student mentors approached and experienced their work with a 6‐day overnight, NSF‐sponsored youth engineering camp (YEC). This study was guided by the question: How did YEC camp counselors approach and experience their roles as mentors?

We conducted an exploratory qualitative study of four Black undergraduate engineering students' experiences with and approaches to near‐peer mentorship in the YEC program. Data consisted of transcripts from two post‐program interviews and one written reflection from each participant. We analyzed data through abductive coding and the funds of knowledge framework.

Through subsequent interpretation of code categories, we found YEC mentors: (1) engaged in altruistic motivations as YEC mentors, (2) leveraged previous experiences to guide their approaches to mentorship, and (3) engaged in self‐directed learning and development.

This study highlights the knowledge and strategies that YEC mentors drew upon in their roles, and how they sought and achieved various personal, academic, and professional benefits. Insights from this study illustrate how near‐peer mentors can support their and others' engineering aspirations.

 

Self-assembly of anisotropic nanomaterials into fluids is a key step in producing bulk, solid materials with controlled architecture and properties. In particular, the ordering of anisotropic nanomaterials in lyotropic liquid crystalline phases facilitates the production of films, fibers, and devices with anisotropic mechanical, thermal, electrical, and photonic properties. While often considered a new area of research, experimental and theoretical studies of nanoscale mesogens date back to the 1920s. Through modern computational, synthesis, and characterization tools, there are new opportunities to design liquid crystalline phases to achieve complex architectures and enable new applications in opto-electronics, multifunctional textiles, and conductive films. This review article provides a brief review of the liquid crystal phase behavior of one dimensional nanocylinders and two dimensional nanoplatelets, a discussion of investigations on the effects of size and shape dispersity on phase behavior, and outlook for exploiting size and shape dispersity in designing materials with controlled architectures. 

This work in progress paper describes results from a NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers grant. The overarching objective of this research is to understand how framing engineering as an altruistic profession affects the engineering identity development of low socioeconomic status (SES) African American 8th - 10th grade students from an urban area within a predominantly rural Southern state. While there has been significant focus on increasing STEM knowledge and career interests for underrepresented minority (predominantly African American) low SES students from rural regions of these states, less focus has been paid to engineering specifically and to urban areas in this region. Little is known about how the intersections of race, poverty, local environment, and regional culture affect this group’s perceptions of potential engineering career pathways. This research seeks to understand the effects of different interventions on students’ self-efficacy and interest in engineering. In the first part, the effects of an existing Saturday STEM program were investigated. In the second part, the effects of a camp and mentoring program which highlights the positive societal impacts of engineering are being investigated. This paper highlights the structure of these programs and findings to date