4 Schools For Women In Engineering Innovative Approaches To Increase Middle School Students' Interest In Stem

Four colleges - Northeastern University (NU), Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Boston University (BU), and Tufts University (Tufts) - are collaborating to introduce engineering to middle schools. Models are being developed to demonstrate concepts that encourage girls and boys to explore STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Each primarily female team includes engineering faculty, middle school teachers, industry volunteers, and undergraduate students. Teams are creating flexible curriculum activities that are classroom tested and documented for national dissemination. Funded by a three-year NSF grant (HRD GSE 0217110), the collaboration is in its second year. Pilots are underway with assessment points to incorporate lessons learned from classroom testing. Each team selected different concepts to develop: - NU’s project has students using basic science concepts and the 8 steps of the engineering design process to design and test an orange juice concentration unit. Students are challenged to provide good-tasting orange juice to Boston Schools for $0.15 a glass. - BU’s project involves genetic coding and decoding. The connection between the codes of the DNA building blocks in genes and physical traits are stressed. Students do hands-on gene manipulation to make bacteria fluoresce and create physical models of DNA/RNA to code and decode genetic traits. - Tufts’ project introduces the concept of number systems and the language of computers (binary). Once students are familiar with patterns of 1’s and 0’s, decoder boxes are distributed and students map binary patterns to letters of the alphabet. Students flip switches and see light patterns that enable decoding of messages. Prototype decoders with unique messages have been built for classroom testing.