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Empowering Underrepresented Groups to Excel in STEM Through Research Sprints
Conference paper   Open access

Empowering Underrepresented Groups to Excel in STEM Through Research Sprints

Daniel Christe, Jay Bhatt, Christopher Sales and Yaghoob Farnam
Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers
23 Jun 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--30369
url
https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--30369View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze),  Open

Abstract

Collaboration Digital media Empowerment Learning Students Technical education Workshops
Learning today is increasingly contextual, embodied, and on-demand. New modes of empowerment through technology are reshaping where, when, and how learning occurs. Research sprints are an integrative, fast-paced, active learning experience emphasizing creativity, collaboration, and communication in which teams "sprint" to find the information needed to solve a challenge. The participants must work together to harvest the information and create appropriate visuals to communicate it in presentations and via social media channels (e.g. Mendeley and Twitter). Two workshops were given during the Summer of 2017 entitled, “Self-Healing Infrastructure,” to female URM middle school students participating in Girls Inc (12 students), and URM high school student participating in the Franklin Institute STEM Scholars program (15 students), respectively. The session's design created the context for students to (i) actively harvest research information using online library tools, such as Engineering Village, (ii) gain hands-on experiments observing healing of concrete by bacteria, and (iii) synthesize and present their findings via graphical abstracts, all in a compressed timespan of 3-4 hours. The graphical abstracts provided visual insights into learners' research pathways from online to laboratory work. In addition to the primary school group reported here, the model has also been tested in undergraduate and graduate engineering classrooms as a way to foster active inquiry and collaborative behaviors.

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