This innovative practice WIP paper describes a cross-disciplinary collaboration between middle school educators, educational researchers, and civil engineers and scientists to design a series of community-centered STEM learning activities focused on water quality and local water concerns in the southeastern United States. The RWE partnership promotes STEM literacy and workforce readiness for students in grades 6–8 through hands-on STEM learning, student-led research projects, and advocacy opportunities based on water treatment and wastewater-related research occurring in a rural community.

This work in progress, innovative practice, paper outlines an interdisciplinary collaborative model utilized by a team of educational researchers, and engineers to design a series of community-centered, place-based learning activities suitable for a middle or high school informal STEM learning environment. Based on the potential applications and benefits of Second-Life Electric Vehicle Batteries, the activities connect cutting-edge STEM research with multidimensional real-world challenges within their communities related to climate change, renewable energy integration and storage, intelligent transportation systems, and optimized energy management, that empowers students to think critically about the role they can play in shaping a more resilient, environmentally sustainable community.

Increasingly, high school students express interest in careers that have purpose and “make a difference”. Furthermore, students from minority racial and linguistic backgrounds may be more interested in careers that offer meaning beyond income or job security. Given these diverse career values, STEM education activities that leverage the motivations and personal values of students to promote learning have the potential to significantly impact student interest and knowledge of engineering careers. To broaden participation in engineering, therefore, a collaborative team-comprised of engineering faculty, education faculty, and high school science teachers-developed a curriculum for formal and informal high school education that aligned with the diverse motivations and life goals of Generation Z students in our predominantly rural region.

Highlighting the role engineers have in solving community and global challenges has been shown to positively affect students' engineering identity development. Poor water quality and water scarcity have been recognized as a critical global issue by many organizations, including the United Nations. Students of all ages can relate to the importance of having drinkable water through their experiences with thirst, drought, floods, news stories, or just accidentally swallowing salt water while on holiday at a beach. This talk describes the development and implementation of a series of engineering education activities focused on water quality. These activities ranged from three-minute activities for community outreach events to week-long lessons for engineering freshmen. Younger students were able to readily recognize how using different types of filters and natural media can increase the clarity of water with particulate or color contamination. Middle and high school students were able to design and test filter set-ups and learn about the role of nanotechnology in water purification. They also developed analytical and data analysis skills through qualitative and quantitative water quality measurements. Freshman engineering students learned about the water industry, local and global water issues, and performed water quality sampling around their campuses using portable meters that log data via a cell phone app. The activities and results were then used to meet university-course outcomes related to the societal impacts of engineering, statistical analysis, plotting data, and written communication. By centering learning on a tangible and important engineering challenge, this work provides a flexible framework for learning and problem solving that can be tailored to the needs of students from different age groups and for different learning outcomes.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents findings on the impact of framing Engineering as a prosocial career on high school students’ engineering identity formation. Engineers are often stereotyped as people who work alone and are primarily motivated by financial rewards. This stereotype may deter students who value altruism from pursuing engineering career pathways. In reality, many engineers work in collaborative, creative, interdisciplinary fields on problems that positively affect society. This work examined the impacts of framing engineering as altruistic on the engineering identity development of low socioeconomic status, predominantly Black high school students in an urban region of the Southern United States. The program consisted of a summer camp and academic year activities that included mentoring from underrepresented minority undergraduate engineering students. The program content was aligned to the US National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges for Engineering (GCEs), a list of 14 critical challenges that society faces that will require engineering solutions to address. Each of these challenges highlights the exciting ways that a career in engineering allows students to serve their communities and improve the lives of others. A convergent, mixed-methods approach was used to understand how this program affected students’ perceptions of and interest in engineering. These results were compared to those for a traditional STEM Saturday informal education program with participants from the same demographic group. The altruistic framing resulted in students’ having a broader definition of engineering as well as increased interest in engineering as a potential career.