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STEM-Discovery – An Integrated Approach to DESIGN

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Conference

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

New Orleans, Louisiana

Publication Date

June 26, 2016

Start Date

June 26, 2016

End Date

June 29, 2016

ISBN

978-0-692-68565-5

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

K-12 & Pre-College Engineering Division: Research-to-Practice: Principles of K-12 Engineering Education and Practice

Tagged Division

Pre-College Engineering Education Division

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/p.25872

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/25872

Download Count

503

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Paper Authors

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Heath Tims Louisiana Tech University

biography

Kelly B. Crittenden Louisiana Tech University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-7025-5055

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Dr Kelly Crittenden is a member of Louisiana Tech University's Integrated STEM Education Center (ISERC), and the Harrelson Family Professor of engineering. He earned his PhD and BS in BioMedical Engineering in 2001, and 1996 respectively. Dr Crittenden's interests lie in K-12 outreach, developing project-driven curricula, and product design.

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Abstract

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 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 ____ University with 12 teachers and 34 students. The STEM-Discovery camp was a natural expansion of the TechSTEP and Cyber Discovery program developed by ________ 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, N – repeating.

Results of the project include activities developed such as: robotic challenges, programming fundamentals, prototyping, and using the business model canvas. This paper will describe the approaches used in integrating STEM fundamentals with liberal arts. Survey data evaluating high school student and faculty perspectives on the effectiveness of the effort will be presented.

Tims, H., & Crittenden, K. B. (2016, June), STEM-Discovery – An Integrated Approach to DESIGN Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.25872

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