Outreach summer camps, particularly those focused on increasing the number of women in STEM, are commonplace. Material science focused camps are popular due to the widespread applications associated with the field and their connection to fundamental fields students are exposed to in high school, such as chemistry. Unfortunately, because of this large scope, camps are often forced to pick and choose what topics are covered. This lack of cohesion within the camp content can lead to participant confusion, which could be misinterpreted as a fundamental lack of engineering understanding or ability. Because of this, we have implemented a weeklong summer camp curriculum composed of a design project and 14 separate topics together using an overarching paradigm as a framework.  While this restructuring on the surface looks promising, very little has been determined regarding the effect curriculum has on participants’ opinion of STEM after camp. To understand the connection between outreach curriculum and STEM self-confidence among high school women, we studied outreach camps that varied in how design was incorporated into their structure. We chose to study a design-focused camp, a design-absent camp, and a design-incorporated camp (run by the authors). Initial results from pre-post surveys with the participants indicate that design-incorporated camp increased the participants’ desire to be an engineer while design-absent camp decreased their participants’ desire to be an engineer. Similar opposing trends were observed for the participants’ perception that engineering is interesting and their desire to apply to engineering programs in college. All three changes were statistically significant. With these results, we hope to continue this study to gather more insight and improve the overall understanding of outreach curriculums and its effect on STEM perceptions.<br/>

Investigating the effect of curriculum on gender-minority STEM outreach camp outcomes

256th National Meeting (2018)

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