Design and Development: Solving Community Problems with Engineering (SCoPE)

Engineering participation in rural communities is a critical need to bolster economic opportunity and meet workforce needs. Students enrolled in rural schools across the United States face barriers to accessing high-quality engineering education, such as lack of resources, lack of attention from reformers, researchers, and legislation, and lack of awareness of the diversity of engineering careers.

Given the rapid growth of available engineering jobs, the shortage of talent to fill these roles, and the 9 million students enrolled in rural public schools, it is prudent to create a curriculum that can engage rural students in personally-relevant engineering problems that can spark interest in further engineering pursuits. Yet, many public schools lack engineering courses.

There is an immense opportunity to use place-based learning to not only integrate engineering into science courses, but also increase students’ understanding of the relevance of engineering to their everyday lives and societal change. WGBH Educational Foundation (GBH)—a major producer of educational STEM media—will develop Solving Community Problems with Engineering (SCoPE), a three-week, seventh-grade capstone project that will empower middle school students in rural and agricultural communities to integrate design thinking in engineering with their existing understanding of science concepts to solve problems that are relevant and meaningful within their community.

Students will plan and test their own engineering solutions for alleviating the impact of nutrient pollution on the local ecosystem by addressing point sources of nutrients. Over the course of the design process, they will use models and a simulation to conceptualize relationships among variables in a complex system, predict potential benefits of their engineering interventions over time, and test their solutions.

Throughout the project, we will collect data through interviews, surveys, and classroom observations. A pilot study at the conclusion of resource development will utilize pre-post content knowledge and engineering interest and attitude assessments, data embedded in the digital tools, and student artifacts to evaluate the potential impact of the project on students’ science and engineering knowledge and interests.

SCoPE aims to: (1) create instructional materials that support rural students in developing a deep understanding of engineering ideas and how they relate to what they learn in science; (2) increase students’ interest in engineering, and their understanding of how engineering practices can be applied to relevant problems in their daily lives; and (3) build our understanding to further develop resources and best practices for implementing engineering pedagogy that is contextualized in local communities.

The study poses three research questions: (1) How can a school, nonprofit, and community organization work together to create relevant engineering curricula for students? (2) How do students’ perceptions of and interest in engineering change after participating in SCoPE? (3) What aspects of SCoPE have the greatest potential to support students in developing a deep understanding of core engineering skills and processes? The project will be conducted in partnership with a regional middle school and the Pleasant Bay Community Boating Marine Science Education Center in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

We will leverage GBH’s extensive national networks and existing platforms to ensure that the resources and findings from SCoPE will reach classrooms across the country. As an organization and as a research and outreach team, we are deeply connected to local and state school systems and can host materials, freely accessible, on PBS LearningMedia.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.