project that is selected by the team and thecoach (a STEM teacher at the high school), and that has local significance for the students andtheir community. The project continues from one academic year to the next, with moststudents continuing as well. In the course of their HSE experience, the students solve authenticSTEM problems, perform testing and analyses, build prototypes, manufacture parts, staywithin budgets, write business plans, and manage their own project. HSE teams also haveprogram-facilitated access to expertise and mentoring from faculty and students in highereducation and from professionals in industry. Figure 1 contains a model of the team supportoffered by the HSE program. Most HSE teams operate as afterschool activities, but we
context.While one participant was walking through the user story of their partner’s concept, the otherparticipant was given Post-It notes to write down issues or questions that arose. These wereexplained to the participant as “parts of the concept that were confusing or strange, that somehowseemed inappropriate to the user, or didn’t work correctly.”2. Listing and grouping concernsAfter the user story, the concerns that were noted were shared with the other participant, and anyadditional concerns were added onto new Post-It notes. The participants were then asked to sortthese concerns as they applied to the five properties of a concept, identified above (i.e., form,function, temporal, use/user, and system). A brief definition of each property (Table 2
. I’m nervous that they’re gonna be like,man, she doesn’t know anything. But otherwise, no, [I’m not nervous]. I think just because it'shands-on, I feel prepared for it, you know, like as far as my technical writing skills and my teamwork skills and my people skills and that kind of stuff.[Now that I’ve been at work for 3 months] Mostly my responsibilities are just doing whateveranybody tells me to do, so that can range anywhere from working on [specific softwarepackage], which is something that I actually know how to do personally … or working on areport or attaching wires or testing some sort of a component. I’m not having to learn a whole lotyet, but for the stuff that I’m doing, I feel completely prepared for it. [...] I read up on