A research-backed, equity-focused approach to out-of-school STEM enrichment.
Students test out their designs from the Engineering Sock Assistive Devices unit from YES Enrichment. Credit: YES Staff.
Creating engaging, fun, and hands-on learning experiences for out-of-school learning settings can be a challenge for educators. However, STEM-anchored enrichment experiences can also be transformative—especially for youth who have lacked opportunities to actively engage with STEM, such as many emergent multilingual learners. Engaging youth with high-quality engineering also plays a vital role in increasing their participation in and affiliation with engineering and expanding their ideas about possible career trajectories. Given emergent multilingual learners ("MLLs") are one of the U.S.’s fastest growing populations, it is critical that these youth have opportunities to participate in STEM to develop an interest in these fields and contribute their ideas and talents. Fortunately, YES Enrichment—our latest suite of STEM curricula—offers a research-backed, equity-focused approach to STEM enrichment that meets students where they are and gives them the opportunity to thrive as engineers while learning and building valuable skills.
An Equity-Based Framework for a New Type of Problem Solver
From its inception, YES Enrichment aimed to engage all youth in engineering. To do so, our curriculum developers sought out approaches and scaffolds that would provide opportunities for participation by every learner, students of different races, ethnicities, genders, and language backgrounds. We created a research-backed, equity-oriented learning framework and used it to anchor the development of YES Enrichment, as well as all our other YES curricular products.
At the core of what sets our Equity-Oriented Framework apart from the field is the focus on how youth should learn, versus the traditional what youth should know. We paid close attention to thinking about what we wanted students to do: undergo a process of solving a problem. In order to do that successfully, youth must think critically, bringing their own unique background to the activities, and considering factors beyond themselves when problem-solving. The Equity-Oriented Framework communicates how engineering learning—knowledge and facility with engineering concepts, practices, and skills—can be developed through more equitable approaches. To make this learning high-quality, authentic, and engaging, our framework centers four domains: socially engaged engineering, asset-based pedagogies, authentic engineering practices, and the development of an engineering identity. Each domain contains design principles that structure resources for various educational settings (i.e., elementary, middle school, and enrichment).
The YES Equity-Oriented Engineering Framework.
With the new framework on hand, our curriculum team attended to the learning needs and realities of non-traditional learning environments. In-classroom YES and EiE units are structured to cover nine lessons ranging from 45 to 60-minute activities that build upon each other until the unit’s completion. YES Enrichment units, however, are made of flexible, 45-minute, open-ended activities.
As we walk through the framework, we’ll use examples from one of our Enrichment units, Engineering Rescue Shuttles, to better understand the framework dimensions and how they function. The unit was tested by teachers and students in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, with a focus on MML students.
In Engineering Rescue Shuttles, students are challenged to engineer a rescue shuttle that can help a person in need of a water rescue. After reading a short description with an illustration of three people in need of a rescue, students choose who they will help—a boy and his dog stuck on their roof, a farmer who needs to move the animals to safety, and a traveler stranded by a landslide on the road. Each requires a shuttle that reaches a slightly different distance. The unit includes videos and illustrations which aid in students’ understanding of the problem and help the activities progress.
The Engineering Rescue Shuttles unit is one of four currently available with more forthcoming.
Socially Engaged Engineering
Socially engaged engineering focuses on creating more equitable societies and engineering solutions. To do this, youth should consider the social, environmental, and ethical implications of their designs. They also should connect their engineering work to their own lives and communities. Research shows children (particularly girls and youth from historically underrepresented groups) are more interested and motivated when they connect their learning to the real world. Using age-appropriate scaffolding, we designed YES Enrichment with socially engaged engineering in mind to help students identify how engineering impacts our society and world.
Socially engaged engineering has three design principles. Students:
- situate the problem in a societal context,
- consider the impacts of the problem on different individuals, groups, or systems,
- and think critically about the impacts of engineered solutions.
For Fallon, an afterschool educator from Houston, TX, whose students had experienced floods, those principles connected students to the problem; they were immediately invested in the activity. “Having that backstory was beneficial because it's like, ‘Wow, that person [in] the comic strip looks like me, they've been through something as well,’” she said. “Seeing them [the students] just go back and forth or what was going on and having that story as well with kids that are their age go through the same thing, I think that really drove it home for them.”
By using real-world problems in our design challenges, students are able to explore issues relevant to their lives—they can make connections to family, friends, community, and more. They are encouraged to use their experiences and knowledge to create solutions to the challenges. In connecting with the challenge, they think deeply about the impact of the problem. They also think critically about the effect of engineered solutions. For the design challenge, students assess the potential effects of the technologies they create, and identify the good and bad consequences of engineered solutions. This aligns with the engineering field, where engineers design solutions to specific, real-world problems and consider the context, background information, needs of the client, and the implications of their solutions.
Authentic Engineering Practices
As they participate in socially engaged engineering, learners engage in engineering practices. This means students doing the kinds of work that create engineering knowledge and solutions—designing, constructing, assessing, testing, etc. They develop their knowledge of engineering through hands-on engagement and learn by doing and working with others. Working on the challenge collaboratively with peers, also helps build students’ teamwork and sense of accomplishment.
STEM activities anchored in authentic practices feature design challenges with several solutions. This allows youth to tap into their own experiences and celebrates creative thinking. Having multiple possible solutions encourages students to consider diverse approaches, while thinking critically about whom specific solutions benefit most.
Nora, an educator from Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, noticed the impact engaging in engineering practices had on her students early on. “I can tell that they made a connection to the engineering process, in the way that engineers think,” she said. “In the second or third day, they were already saying, ‘Okay, we are doing this phase, we are thinking this way, we are flipping the failure… we are gonna improve. This is not the end, I'm not gonna get frustrated,’ [It was] their way of thinking as the engineer.”
Authentic engineering practices also scaffold in persistence, risk-taking, and productive failure. Students learn how important failure and iteration are and develop a growth mindset from activities modeling persistence and learning from unsuccessful attempts. Authentic engineering practices also cultivate collaboration and teamwork—which students partake in through engineering in teams, sharing designs and ideas, and by learning essential negotiation and collaboration skills.
Jennifer, an educator from Chelsea, MA, agreed. “Improvements and problem solving is an everyday struggle for most students. This engineering program can really be a way to practice these skills.”
Students trying out rockets from the Engineering Rescue Shuttles unit. Credit: YES Staff.
As students progress through the Rescue Shuttles unit, they are met with illustrations that deepen their understanding of the problem and shape their designs. Julie, an educator from Chelsea, MA, explained the effect the design problem had on her afterschool students: “Students got to practice the design process. Most importantly, they got to connect the design process to real life problems. Through this activity, it was easy to recognize the need for the engineering design process using the rescue shuttle illustration. We had a lot of great conversations around the subject of rescue shuttles.”
Comics offer another way for students to connect with the problem and impact their designs.
Said Farah, a student in Puerto Rico: “I love comics, because, I’m being honest, I don’t like to read… but with the comic, we’re reading, but in a fun way.”
Asset-Based Pedagogies
Asset-based pedagogies help students develop familiarity with materials, tasks, and terminology. They create multi-modal, flexible activities that also use affordable, readily available materials. Students are able to participate in scaffolding activities and develop vital knowledge, skills, and tools of the world around them. With asset-based pedagogies, students bring their experiences and knowledge from non-school contexts and use that knowledge in disciplinary-aligned ways. This helps support their developing vocabulary related to the engineering design process, along with the unit’s accompanying materials that provide multiple ways for students to share and document their designs. Youth are also able to understand content and express that knowledge in multiple ways—something of particular importance to MMLs and students with special needs.
Example of scaffolding used in the Rescue Shuttles unit, featuring visual reminders of the distances, sentence stems to support discourse between students, and a space for students to sketch their ideas.
With asset-based pedagogies, students are constructing, reading, writing, speaking, and listening all while collaboratively working with partners and having fun. They help connect students to the problem who might otherwise disengage.
Engineering Identity
An essential part of students building an engineering identity is being able to see themselves as capable of doing engineering. YES Enrichment spotlights the final dimension of the equity-based learning framework by providing role models with diverse demographic characteristics and nurturing students’ engineering mindsets and identities. Students are able to learn from diverse role models presented as characters in context-setting narratives, such as comics, stories, and videos, and their community.
Students’ familiarity with the real-world problems in the challenges, along with relatable characters, sets the stage for them to think critically about their world, their actions, and how they can positively affect their community. By engaging in authentic engineering practices from an early age, students bolster their interest, understanding, abilities, and engineering identity. They build confidence and skills that serve them well long after the design challenge is completed.
Gina and Rene, educators from Chelsea, MA, used YES Enrichment activities for their students. They said the design challenges impacted students’ skills in several ways.
“I noticed the youth thinking about solutions to other problems on the day-to-day basis,” said Rene. “For example, a teacher had crutches, and she mentioned they were uncomfortable. The youth started thinking about ways to make them more comfortable.”
Added Gina, “These practices are great for students to apply to any problem they have—socially, academically, etc.”
Nora (the educator from Puerto Rico) noted the transformation in her student Yasif’s participation. In all aspects of class, he engineered and became more confident in that identity. Not only was he engaged in the engineering, taking risks as he developed new skills, but he was also more willing to take risks as he developed his English language abilities. He read out loud more, engaged in class discussions, and worked collaboratively with peers.
A student’s response in their engineering notebook after engaging with YES Enrichment.
We couldn’t agree more with the thought expressed in the image above, and we’re proud YES Enrichment helps students develop and hone essential skills that will serve them well beyond our design challenges. It all comes back to fulfilling our mission of educating the next generation of problem-solvers, critical thinkers, and engineers. And just as a core part of our asset-based pedagogies is affordable materials, our YES Enrichment unit guides are available to download for free—thanks to the generous assistance of the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant #2054341). We’ve got more on the way, and you can be among the first to know about them by signing up here.
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Still curious about YES Enrichment? Learn more in our article here.
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