Engineering Everyday Discovery Program: Motivating Middle School Children's Interest in STEM

Middle school (6 -8 grade) has been shown to be a crucial juncture for maintaining student motivation, interest and awareness in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Toward that end many summer informal STEM education experiences have been established for middle school students. While these experiences can be very fun and engaging for students, they often consist of prescribed experiments, projects, and investigations. Here we present a novel summer enrichment program, Everyday Engineering, which consists of both the prescribed experiments/activities and also a design project based investigation which allows the students to explore their imaginative side in the design and prototyping of an invention of their own creation. The Everyday Engineering program, designed for middle school students, was a one week all day (8:15 am – 5:00 pm) summer camp on the campus of a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). For part of the day students participated in prescribed hands-on experiments and activities in bioengineering, computer science, robotics, and electrical circuits. During the second part of the program students were mentored in idea generation, design, research and prototyping their invention. The day concluded with various indoor/outdoor free play activities. The week concluded with the students presenting their inventions (flip chart and oral) to engineering faculty, technology transfer faculty, parents and friends. While the sample is not large, the student evaluations are overwhelmingly positive and show that a one week, interdisciplinary summer informal STEM education program can provide an educational experience which fosters with children’s motivation, interest, and awareness in STEM.