Hk Maker Lab 2.0: Inspiring Engineering Design Thinking in Grades 6 - 12 Students and Teacher

STEM identity – the view of oneself as a scientist or engineer – plays a crucial role in students’ motivation to pursue STEM education and careers. Providing pre-college students with project-based experiences that challenge them to employ STEM thinking and practices is essential in STEM identity development. The burden of creating these opportunities falls largely on teachers, who may feel ill-equipped to impart these concepts, especially in teaching engineering and engineering design - an area of emphasis in the widely adopted Next Generation Science Standards. This is unfortunate because engineering design is an exciting entry point for STEM that involves inquiry, project-based learning, and the application of technical skills and knowledge to real-world problems. The Hk Maker Lab has provided engineering design-centric education to hundreds of high school students and has prepared educators to teach engineering design and incorporate design thinking into their classes. We are now ready to extend our efforts to middle school students and teachers to further propel grades 6-12 students toward STEM opportunities at a crucial juncture in their educational journeys. The Specific Aims of the proposed program are to: Provide early engineering education opportunities to middle school students via Design Hackathons that will take place throughout the academic year, in addition to continuing the annual Summer Design Camp for high school students. Expand teacher training to middle school teachers to develop their engineering design knowledge and self-efficacy so that they can integrate design into their instruction. Cultivate a cohort of master ‘Teachineers’ who are highly adept in engineering design thinking and instruction and can teach design thinking to other teachers via professional development workshops. This research will give both teachers and students hands-on design experiences. The student participants will have the opportunity to engineer solutions to problems. Working with middle school students will create a positive STEM trajectory. The participating teachers will receive an innovative training experience, which they can subsequently use to integrate engineering design into their school curricula. Finally, by empowering teachers to train their colleagues, we will be able to scale these efforts, increasing the impact of our engineering design training and broadening STEM education opportunities for all students.