Development And Implementation Of An Introduction To Stem Course For Dual Enrollment Programs

An Introduction to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) course was improved and taught for the second time during the summer in 2010 to dualenrollment college students at South Texas College (STC). Minority students solve challenges and perform hands-on activities as experiences to correlate their studies with real-world contexts. Introduction to STEM was developed as a collaboration project between STEM Faculty members at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) and STC. This collaboration intended to create, support, and strengthen STEM pathways for minority students at the two year college, including students in the Dual-Enrollment Engineering Academy (DEEA) and other dual-enrollment or similar programs. The new course was offered to four groups of about 15 students each in the DEEA program, at two different STC campuses. Challenge-based instruction (CBI) was implemented; challenges, lectures, handouts, hands-on activities, and assessment tools were developed in topics such as electronics, renewable energy, mechatronics, statics, dynamics, chemistry, reverse engineering, and forward engineering. This paper describes the improvements and the modifications made to the course in order to improve student engagement and motivation during the second year Introduction to STEM was offered. Affect survey results are presented and compared to the results of the previous year of this project. Based on the positive results that were obtained in this project, it is argued that CBI is an effective and well received pedagogy for high-school student and that the CBI materials and tools developed for this course could be modified and adapted in other engineering and science courses at UTPA, STC, and other institutions to attract students to STEM fields.