An Investigation of Students' Experiences in a K-12 Invention Program (Evaluation)

The InVenture Challenge is an innovation-driven experience for K-12 students that operates in partnership with an institute of higher education. Students across all grade levels and educational settings (e.g., regular, gifted, and AP classrooms in a variety of subject areas; after school programs) are eligible to participate. Generally, students work in small groups to develop an invention from problem-seeking to prototype over the course of multiple months. In the process, they present their ideas to others, solicit feedback, and iterate on their design multiple times. In the spring, students with the top inventions from their individual schools travel to Georgia Institute of Technology to pitch their inventions to judges and audience members in a statewide competition. The goal of this research is to understand the experiences of teachers and students within the program and the ways they benefit from participating. Initial research efforts have focused primarily on teachers’ experiences implementing the program. Through survey, focus group, and interview data collected over the past several years, teachers have also provided their perspectives about how the program has impacted their students. Across several academic years, teachers’ survey data reflects a high level of agreement that participation has had a positive impact on their students’ communication and teamwork skills, enthusiasm for learning about engineering and entrepreneurship, and knowledge of the engineering design process, how products are made, how to design a sales pitch, and how to start a business. In this paper, we summarize several years of teacher data related to perceived impact on students and present our first pre-post student survey data. This student survey data will allow us to directly investigate students’ experiences within the program and examine alignment with their teachers’ perceptions of student impacts. Together, this research will provide a multi-faceted view of invention education’s impacts on students. Introduction, Background, and Guiding Questions Educational institutions at both K-12 and post-secondary levels have ramped up efforts to provide students with opportunities to invent, often within the context of activities that fall under the maker movement [1]. Such opportunities take myriad forms, including required class projects, optional after school clubs, and school and state level competitions. Students may invent alone or in groups, their choice of what to invent may be constrained or wide open, they may share their inventions with classmates and teachers only, or with industry professionals and a wider audience outside their schools. Their inventions may be a physical product, an online tool or website, or something else entirely. A formal invention-focused curriculum may or may not be used. Underlying these widely varying educational efforts is the assumption that students benefit in some way by going through the experience of inventing. What evidence do we have that this assumption is correct? What types of benefits do invention-focused educational curricula and experiences confer to students? While there is a general sense that students benefit from involvement in these types of experiences, the formal literature reflects a limited understanding of what specific benefits to students occur through participation in invention education, as well as a lack of reliable and validated measures of these outcomes. Limited empirical evidence, gathered through interviews with educators, suggests that students who engage in maker-centered education may experience gains in problem-solving, risk-taking, teamwork skills, self-efficacy, and sense of community; the authors of this work emphasize the need for educators and researchers in this area to “document and assess makercentered learning and teaching...to support research that looks at maker experiences through a learning lens” [2]. Figuring out how students benefit from invention-focused education, and what aspects of the educational experience specifically confer these benefits, is a critical element of amassing the robust set of empirical evidence necessary to justify the use of instructional time to pursue such experiences [1]. This paper aims to bolster our understanding of what students experience, and what they gain, when they participate in a specific invention-focused program. Evidence on the nature of their experiences, and the extent to and manner in which they benefit from these experiences, is taken from both teachers’ reports on students’ experiences as well as students’ own reports about their experiences. The InVenture Challenge (IC) is a university-based outreach program that seeks to inspire the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs through invention education curriculum and events. The IC was originally developed in 2013 as a high school-level competition piloted by two high school science teachers. The teachers were mentored by creators of the Georgia Tech (GT) InVenture Prize, an undergraduate invention competition with a live TV show airing on Georgia Public Broadcasting [3]. During the 2016-17 school year, 2500 K-12 students participated in the IC program, with 82 of the top teams ranging from 1st through 12th grade presenting their inventions at the state finals held at Georgia Tech. IC is unique in that it is generally teacher-facilitated, teamwork-oriented, and flexible. Students are free to work on a project of their choosing, and teachers are free to implement InVenture lessons where they see fit, and they often collaborate with teachers in other disciplines to do so. Teachers have used InVenture curriculum in Gifted classes, after-school programs, AP science and math courses, and even English classes, because of the heavy communication requirements. IC event offerings include teacher professional development workshops in the summer, virtual (online) interim pitch feedback for students in the winter, and the state finals competition in the spring. Schools often host local competitions to determine their top teams for state finals. At state finals, students come to campus to compete with their inventions and are judged by university faculty, industry professionals, government representatives, and members of the education community. Our efforts investigating IC have been ongoing since Spring 2015. Teachers were the initial focus of these efforts; through online surveys, focus groups, and interviews with teachers, we have gained a detailed understanding of both teachers’ perceptions of IC, as well as their perceptions of how their students experience and benefit from IC. Across three academic years of collecting this teacher data, teachers have consistently reported high levels of agreement that their students make gains in multiple outcomes as a result of their IC participation. These outcomes include knowledge about engineering and entrepreneurship, presentation skills, teamwork, knowledge about specific invention-related content, exposure to and increased interest in engineering, entrepreneurship, and invention related career paths, confidence, and understanding how the process of science works, among others [4], [5]. This research aims to follow findings from the teacher data, and was designed to investigate students’ experiences and outcomes. We sought to triangulate the findings from our teacher data with student-reported data. The research questions guiding the student research, which entailed pre and post surveys for the 2016-2017 academic year, are as follows: 1. What is the nature of students’ experiences with participating in IC? 2. What do students report in terms of their standing on outcomes of interest (e.g., 21st century skills, self-efficacy) at the beginning and end of their experience in IC? In the sections that follow, we will summarize the methodology and results on both the teacher data on student experiences, and the student data.