Full-Scale Development: Designing Our World: A Community Envisioning Girls as Engineers

October 1st, 2013 - September 30th, 2017 | PROJECT

This full-scale project addresses the need for more youth, especially girls, to pursue an interest in engineering and eventually fill a critical workforce need. The project leverages museum-based exhibits, girls' activity groups, and social media to enhance participants' engineering-related interests and identities. The project includes the following bilingual deliverables: (1) Creative Solutions programming will engage girls in group oriented engineering activities at partner community-based organizations, where the activities highlight altruistic, personally relevant, and social aspects of engineering. Existing community groups will use the activities in their regular meeting structure. Visits to the museum exhibits, titled Design Your World will reinforce messages; (2) Design Your World Exhibits will serve as a community hub at two ISE institutions (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the Hatfield Marine Science Center). They will leverage existing NSF-funded Engineer It! (DRL-9803989) exhibits redesigned to attract, engage, and mobilize a more diverse population by showcasing altruistic, personally relevant, and social aspects of engineering; (3) Digital engagement through targeted use of social media will complement program and exhibit content and be an online portal for groups engaged in the project; (4) A community action group (CAG) will provide professional development opportunities to stakeholders interested in girls' STEM identity (e.g. parents, STEM-based business professionals) to promote effective engineering messaging throughout the community and engage them in supporting project participants; and (5) Longitudinal research will explore how girls construct and negotiate engineering-related identities through discourse across the project activities and over time.

Project Website(s)

(no project website provided)

Project Products

2014 Poster - Designing Our World
Designing Our World: Public Audiences Front-End Evaluation Report
2016 Poster - Designing Our World: A Community Envisioning Girls as Engineers
Designing Our World Summative Evaluation Year 3
Designing Our World Summative Evaluation Year 4
Identity Negotiation Within Peer Groups During an Informal Engineering Education Program: The Central Role of Leadership-Oriented Youth
STEM Identity: A Reflective Tool for Educators
The identity-frame model: A framework to describe situated identity negotiation for adolescent youth participating in an informal engineering education program

Team Members

Jamie Hurd, Principal Investigator, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Scott Pattison, Co-Principal Investigator, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Kendall Bartholomew, Co-Principal Investigator, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Lynn Dierking, Co-Principal Investigator, Oregon State University
Cecilia Garibay, Evaluator, Garibay Group

Funders

Funding Source: NSF
Funding Program: ISE/AISL
Award Number: 1322306
Funding Amount: $593,575

Tags

Access and Inclusion: English Language Learners | Ethnic | Racial | Hispanic | Latinx Communities | Low Socioeconomic Status | Women and Girls
Audience: Elementary School Children (6-10) | Evaluators | Learning Researchers | Middle School Children (11-13) | Museum | ISE Professionals | Parents | Caregivers | Youth | Teen (up to 17)
Discipline: Education and learning science | Engineering | Nature of science
Resource Type: Project Descriptions
Environment Type: Community Outreach Programs | Exhibitions | Media and Technology | Museum and Science Center Exhibits | Professional Development | Conferences | Networks | Professional Development and Workshops | Public Programs | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media