Improving Students' STEM-Identity Through Design and Tinkering (2024-2025)
This team examined how equitable, hands-on engineering education can enhance adolescents’ self-efficacy and identity as community-focused engineers. While research often highlights barriers faced by racial and gender minorities in STEM, few studies explore how those barriers shape innovation. Through Ignite, an outreach program that connects Duke students with Durham middle and high schoolers to co-create projects grounded in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the team is investigating how local problem-solving fosters resilience, collaboration and sustained STEM engagement.
The previous year’s team built a theoretical framework and collected baseline data on STEM engagement, self-efficacy and resilience among Ignite participants. In 2024-2025, members refined that framework and implemented an experimental intervention called Ignite Generation 2, which engaged about 80 students in an eight-week program featuring virtual coursework, hands-on weekend sessions at the Museum of Life and Science and a final design conference at Duke. By incorporating new research variables such as team-based learning and iterative design, the project will generate insights to strengthen Ignite’s curriculum and contribute to engineering education scholarship on equity, innovation and community impact.
Timing
Fall 2024 – Summer 2025
Team Outputs
Impacts of Human-Centered Design on STEM and Community-Identity (Poster presentation at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, April 16, 2025)
See related Data+ summer project, Improving Students’ STEM-Identity Through Design and Tinkering (2024), and earlier related team, Ignite: Improving Students' STEM-Identity Through Human-Centered Design (2023-2024).
Image: Ignite middle school students learn to solder with undergraduate student trainer, Paula (right), by Megan Madonna