Expanding Access through Educational Instrumentation: Enhancing STEM Undergraduate Education

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Educational Instrumentation project at Los Angeles Mission College (LAMC) will strengthen undergraduate learning in chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science. Specifically, this project will secure a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, gas chromatograph, electron diffraction equipment, a 3D land surveying scanner, Arduino and Raspberry PI kits, and a selection of other equipment to support students in surveying, robotics, and engineering courses. These equipment will enrich 17 courses serving over 1500 students per year and will allow students to participate in authentic, hands-on training relevant to the STEM workforce. In addition to providing improved experiences for undergraduates pursuing STEM degrees at LAMC across multiple courses, the new equipment will also be used to offer summer bootcamps for Los Angeles high school students that will highlight authentic STEM skills and career opportunities. The goals of this project are to enrich the learning and experiences of undergraduate students by providing critical equipment in chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science. Across multiple lab and field courses at LAMC, students will utilize the new equipment to build skills and explore topics that would be relatively inaccessible without modern technology. The project will assess the impact of the project-funded equipment using institutional data and post-course surveys. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM learning and teaching at HSIs. 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.