Shifting to a Virtual Summer STEM Program for High School Students (Evaluation)

Abstract The number of STEM jobs is growing so rapidly that there are projected shortages of up to 3.5 million STEM workers in the United States in the next five years. Additionally, STEM fields, particularly engineering, lack diversity with female students and students of color underrepresented in STEM majors and STEM careers. For example, while 25% of the U.S. population are people of color, this group only constitutes 11% of STEM professionals. Thus, the engineering and workforce development and outreach activities of our Engineering Research Center (ERC) are designed to promote STEM pathways that both increase and diversify the pool of K-12 students seeking STEM careers. 2021 was a year filled with new challenges and opportunities for learning and outreach. This paper reports on a high school outreach program designed to promote interest in STEM, with a focus on biomedical engineering, that is part of a large Engineering Research Center. Initially intended to be an on-campus program with authentic research experiences, the outreach program was forced to move online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift was accompanied by both expected and unexpected obstacles, as well as opportunities. This paper reports on the evaluation of the online engineering outreach program and discusses the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of online STEM outreach for high school students. The outreach program was a partnership of an Engineering Research Center with a local high school in a diverse, urban school district. 26 students were selected as participants, and 24 students attended at least a single meeting on Google Meets. Of these students, 71% were female and 29% were male, from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Students were invited to participate in the six-week outreach program. We provided STEM kits for students to explore biomedical engineering from their homes. STEM kits included a wheat germ DNA extraction activity, BioRad's pGLO plasmid investigation kit, brine shrimp cryopreservation simulation lab, and a MudWatt bio-energy kit. The program was facilitated virtually by undergraduate and graduate students, with different graduate engineering and science researchers joining as guest speakers and experts each week. Expected obstacles included restructuring the length of daily time allotted for the program, as well as a summer schedule; student recruitment incentives; homelife interference; and a shift in planned lessons and investigations. Unforeseen obstacles included managing and encouraging student participation; supply delivery mishaps; and perhaps most significantly - rates of success for at-home experiments. While these obstacles required program facilitators to adjust the way they originally envisioned and planned the program, the shift to online instruction also resulted in opportunities. For example, a larger number of affiliated STEM graduate and postdoctoral students were willing to lead video chats with high school participants about their post-secondary education journey, more flexible hours for participants in high school with unique homelife situations, and lessons focused on professionalism and networking within the STEM fields.