CAREER: Engineering in Youth-led Technology-rich Settings: Promoting Belonging and Preventing Harm

We live in a world where we increasingly use technology to do essential daily tasks, and the number of STEM and non-STEM jobs that use technology is steadily increasing. Yet, only students who have access to expensive resources or see themselves as people who are good with technology due to many factors, including images in popular media, have opportunities to develop comfort and fluency in engineering and technology.

Often, youth do not engage with engineering and technology because they feel like they do not "belong" in engineering. In this project, middle and high school youth will lead the design of spaces where different types of technologies (for example, 3d printers, laser and vinyl cutters, microcontroller boards, sensors and other electronics, sewing machines, and hand tools) will be used, by youth, to solve engineering problems relevant to them in a low-stakes environment.

The spaces will be designed with two aims: 1) to support youth in developing a sense of belonging to the space and in engineering; and 2) to consider preventing harm to communities and the environment as central to their engineering problem-solving. The youth will also work with the research team to develop ways to introduce the idea of preventing harm to people and the environment as an essential tenet of engineering and develop best practices to create similar youth-led technology-rich spaces.

The project will also bring together groups of coordinators who run such spaces and students who are or might become leaders in such spaces, to learn from them and support them in learning new ideas.

Using technology to create artifacts aligned with students’ interests and motivations has great promise in attracting students to engineering. Still, many people do not benefit from such opportunities. A lack of sense of belonging in engineering and STEM contexts plays a clear role, as do the inadvertent gatekeeping behaviors of teachers, shop staff, and coordinators.

This project addresses these barriers by conducting youth participatory work to meet the unmet promises of technology-rich spaces in engineering education. The project has two primary goals: Goal 1: To support youth in leading explorations of how technology use and creation can support a sense of belonging in engineering. Goal 2: To develop a framework along with youth that centers preventing harm to people and the environment when engineering.

For the research component of this project, the team will develop 1) best practices to promote belonging in technology-rich settings and an instrument to assess it, 2) a framework to center preventing harm in engineering design practices, and 3) best practices for youth to lead the development and maintenance of technology-rich engineering spaces. The educational plan of the proposal will focus on integrating research findings with an engineering design curriculum in a first-year engineering course and training and development programs for informal engineering educators and youth leaders.

This work will significantly contribute to the PI’s long-term career vision to support a wide range of students in using engineering and technology to live lives of purpose and connection in an increasingly engineered world.

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.