Design and Development of Interactive Technologies that Support Youth Learning

Across the country, the semiconductor and microelectronics industry is projected to need thousands of new skilled workers by 2030, even as millions of American youth remain disconnected from school and the workforce. These young people, “NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) youth”, represent nearly a quarter of Gen Z nationally, and face real barriers to re-entry, including unstable housing and interrupted schooling. Our project will address that gap by developing and studying EngStarter+, a portable, hands-on microelectronics learning kit paired with an engineering curriculum grounded in local, real-world problems such as energy, food, and water. Working with youth-serving organizations in Indianapolis’ emerging coalition of housing security-focused groups, the project will bring engineering learning directly into community spaces that already serve NEET youth, rather than requiring them to re-enter a traditional classroom first. Youth participants will beta-test use of our EngStarter+ kit and localized curriculum, with built-in guidance and feedback, allowing them to design, test, and troubleshoot real engineering solutions to problems that matter in their own communities. By combining hands-on hardware, community-based mentorship, and artificial intelligence, the project aims to help youth see themselves as capable engineers and technical problem-solvers, building confidence and skills that can open pathways to further education and the technical workforce. This project directly supports NSF’s RITEL program, which calls for high-risk, high-reward technologies that reimagine how and where learning happens. By investing in re-engagement pathways for youth who are NEET and not in traditional STEM pipeline pathways, this project will help build a more expansive and capable technical workforce while generating open-source tools and educational resources that others can adopt and adapt. This project will design, implement, and study EngStarter+, an AI-enabled microelectronics learning ecosystem, delivered through the “Localized Engineering in Displacement (LED)” curriculum, to investigate how interactive technologies foster self-regulated learning (SRL), design fluency, and STEM identity among NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) youth. The project pursues two aims: to understand how interactive, context-based learning environments re-engage youth disconnected from formal STEM education, and to establish new computational and theoretical frameworks for modeling learning in informal, semi-structured settings. Three research questions query youth learning trajectories, computational modeling of interaction data, and generalizable design principles, and the project will work with youth participants and facilitators across four organizations within the Creative Youth Housing Coalition of Indianapolis over three years. Using a Design-Based Research with Co-design (DBR-C) approach across two cycles, the project will collect multimodal learning analytics, reflection logs, facilitator field notes, interviews, and youth-created artifacts. Hidden Markov Models, combined with sequence-based clustering, will model learners' cognitive trajectories using telemetry data such as circuit builds, code uploads, and troubleshooting actions. An Empowerment Evaluation framework, whose implementation will be led by an external evaluator, will engage youth, facilitators, and community partners as co-interpreters of project data and co-designers of success metrics throughout the project. Expected outcomes include validated design principles for AI-enabled, SRL-aligned scaffolding; new computational models linking interaction data to design fluency and identity development; contextualized LED curriculum modules tied to energy, water, and food security; and an open-source EngStarter+ hardware and software ecosystem that can be adopted by other TVET, community college, and university-community partnerships. This project is funded by the Research on Innovative Technologies for Enhanced Learning (RITEL) program that supports early-stage exploratory research in emerging technologies for teaching and learning. 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.