STEM-Discovery – An Integrated Approach to DESIGN

Faculty members from the College of Engineering and Science teamed up with the College of Business and the College of Liberal Arts to develop an engaging experience aimed at high school students and teachers. By including and focusing on teachers, the program will ultimately have broader impact on much greater number of students for years to come. Prior to the camp, teachers are led through Professional Development activities that model the camp experience. This allows for teachers to provide a deeper context for the students that attend. During the summer of 2015 the camp was piloted at Louisiana Tech University with 12 teachers and 34 students. The STEM-Discovery camp was a natural expansion of the TechSTEP and Cyber Discovery program developed by Louisiana Tech University. The camp consists of discussion sessions, hands on labs, programming exercises, team-building experiences, communication skills, and fundamental STEM topics in order to show a broad perspective of design. Teams of teachers and students are motivated to understand fundamental STEM topics within the context of interesting design challenges. Additionally, teams are exposed to key enabling technologies of engineering design software and modern prototyping equipment and tools. This builds a spirit of teamwork while enhancing both oral and written communication skills. In order to design content that provided these educational objectives, the Project Execution Team, along with the content experts in each of the three primary threads followed the DESIGN model, proposed in this project. DESIGN can be demonstrated as: Describing, Exploring, Selecting, Implementing, Gaging, and repeating N number of times.