Helping educators leverage youth interest in STEM out-of-school programs

Many efforts to broaden participation of underreppresented youth in STEM fields involve the implementation of short-term, informal learning engagements to provide exposure to STEM activity (e.g., one-day workshops, one-week camps, summer-long programs). To attract youth who may not have an existing interest in STEM, one common approach is to situate the learning activities within other interest areas such as fashion, hip-hop, dance, or storytelling. While researchers, designers, and practitioners are exploring these strategies to entice youth to enter such programs, little is known about how youths' incoming interests and the interests areas embedded and promoted in the program activities interact. Further, there are also many questions about how adult educators who engage with youth should recognize and leverage interests as they interact with youth, design instruction, and provide encouragement and feedback. These issues are even more pertinent in such short-term programs in which adult educators (typically) have little or no familiarity with youth when they begin a program. In this poster, we describe a two-week summer program for middle school girls that involves topics such as fashion and dance to introduce and develop STEM skills. We share how we are using survey data, collected at the initiation of the program, to generate information about youths' incoming interests. A key question we investigate in this work is: How can information about girls' interests be used by mentors as a support for engaging youth in a STEM program? We describe our process for gathering interest-related data, the use of exploratory data analysis and clustering methods, and the ways in which we are working with mentors to provide summaries and visual displays related youth interest that can be used in their day-to-day practice. For efforts aimed at broadening participation of youth in STEM fields by connecting to existing interests, this work has implications for both social practice design as well as for the design of sociotechnical systems used by youth and adult educators within educational environments intended to support STEM learning.