Unknown Territory: K-12 STEM Summer Exploration through Zoom

Abstract

In response to COVID-19, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) had to cancel all in-person summer camps, that typically reach and expand the STEM identity of 150 middle school age youth (Roberts & Hughes, 2019). As we planned for informal STEM education programming during a pandemic, we decided to transition to a 10-week online Summer Exploration Series (SES) with the goal of increasing youth’s interest in STEM and knowledge of STEM careers relevant to materials science. The SES program engaged 184 youth of all ages in the interdisciplinary science and engineering research at the MagLab. Each week included live components (e.g., introduction to weekly concept and Ask Me Anything with a MagLab scientist/engineer) and asynchronous components (e.g., links to relevant content on the MagLab website and a video-recorded Career Interview). Participants could pick and choose which daily activities/weeks they wanted to participate in. All live components were recorded and available online along with the asynchronous materials. To keep an interactive hands-on aspect to the program, our MagLab educator engaged the youth in a weekly challenge that was introduced on Monday. Participating youth could submit evidence that they completed the challenge through written, photographic or video submissions. Between 13 to 20 youth submitted their challenge results each week. In terms of demographics, we were particularly proud of the reach of the SES program. The majority of the students were middle school age (65%) but we had a range of 1st graders (1) to 12th graders (1). In terms of race, 31.3% of our participants were members of underrepresented groups in STEM (American Indian, African American/Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander). A common goal for MagLab ISE programs is to have at least 50% of our participants come from Title I schools. Despite the transition to online programming, we were still able to reach 96 (55%) Title I students through our marketing. A quarter of our participants came from outside of our local Tallahassee area, which would not have been possible with an in-person program. We saw a decline in our gender representation with only 39% of the participants identifying as female. 100% of the participants rated the program as above average or outstanding, crediting the program with teaching them about new STEM careers/topics and increasing their interest in STEM. Our evaluation indicated that the weekly topics had similar engagement levels, with some offering more opportunities for students to learn something new about the topic (E.g, during the life science week only 70% of participants claimed to have learned something more about the topic compared to 100% during the Magnet focused weeks). The live sessions, particularly those that offered more opportunities for interaction, were rated higher than the asynchronous sessions, providing evidence to the benefits of live - even if online – sessions on increasing interest in STEM. Should we run the program again, we will work on our marketing to girls and broaden our national footprint. In the full article we will present a more detailed description of the program and evaluation results.