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It is important for future engineers to understand themselves in relation to the many cultural influences they may encounter during their career, and to confront their own biases when interacting with colleagues whose cultural backgrounds are different from their own. This paper describes and evaluates a series of nine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops developed and implemented during the summer of 2022 for high school and entering first-year college students enrolled in the Research, Academics, and Mentoring Pathways (RAMP) sixweek engineering summer bridge program at University of Massachusetts Lowell. The workshops incorporated activities designed to create an environment fostering respect, belonging, and acceptance to make teamwork more inclusive and effective. Each workshop was based on collaborative learning and used a broad range of strategies to engage students as active participants in learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion within the context of teamwork. To develop the workshops, the facilitators aligned the activities with key themes from chapters in the book From Athletics to Engineering: 8 Ways to Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for All [1]. The summer bridge program was evaluated using quantitative and qualitative data collected throughout the program and upon its conclusion tracking students’ reactions and levels of engagement in each of the program components. This included a pre-survey, mid-semester survey, post-survey, and weekly journal prompts on Google Classroom. We also used the Universality-Diversity scale [2] to measure any pre-post changes in students’ attitudes towards diversity. With regard to the workshops, an analysis of student responses indicated a high level of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. Students reported they enjoyed getting to know each other better and that the DEI activities were interactive, educational, and engaging. 

Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building. We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies. Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections. Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful.