We originally started collaborating through a NSF NOYCE project…our College of Engineering has been pretty active in the K12 front for many years and they became interested in NOYCE because they had career changer Engineers wanting to become teachers. The collaboration grew from there into a very fruitful and exciting one! Craig Schroeder, a Ph.D. in math Ed and a current STEM teacher in K12, was doing some summer reading and realized that during the summer is where many of our students drop off. This is especially true for our underrepresented populations since they don’t have the same access to opportunities as others do. So Craig invited an engineering professor (Bruce Walcott) and some other STEM faculty and teachers to start the STEM camp. They started in 2010 with 8 students hosting it at a local middle school. In 2011 we had 32 students. Then in 2012 we decided that it would be even better on campus…that’s when the came really grew and our collaborations were forged even more. In terms of bridging expertise across the disciplines…sometimes we have co-presenters from the different STEM areas to help bring out that across discipline perspective and some of the faculty naturally do this themselves with the activities they conduct with the students. For example, one of our biology professors has the students conduct experiments on drosophila. They are learning about the physiology of them; but they also collect data, create charts, analyze the data, and compare the results to similar data they collected and analyzed on themselves. It’s a really nice representation of how biology and mathematics work hand in hand.

Thank you Margaret. This background shows how university faculty can successfully collaborate with K-12 teachers and be more responsive to the local, community interests. Great! Kudos to your team for their sustained work building this project.

Thank you!

Thank you for your sharing the article “What is education for?” While our project focuses specifically on STEM and broadening students’ participation in STEM, we incorporate several components of participatory readiness by providing opportunities for students to develop the knowledge necessary to effectively become change agents in the 21st century.

Well done! I’d love to hear more about these components that promote participatory readiness among your students. Can you share a couple of examples where the students learn how to become change agents?

Some of the sessions focus on how they can use the knowledge they learned during the STEM Camp to impact and become change agents in today’s society. For example, one of the sessions focused on sustainability, and the students designed and presented a sustainable product. With this knowledge, the students developed an understanding of what is needed to advocate for more sustainable resources.

Our goal with the project is to build a replication model. In addition to our 2 camps this summer, we are also assisting another university in Kentucky in starting their first STEM Camp. The camp will be held at Morehead State University; MSU is in Eastern Kentucky and so it reaches more of the rural, potential first generation college student population. It has been a lot of fun helping them plan and create a vision for their own camp!

With any project, there are definitely always challenges and this one is no different. We would love to be able to host everyone who registers for camp. This year our camp filled up in 24 hours! We ended up opening another week of camp to accommodate an additional 72 students. Even with the extra week of camp we ended up with a waiting list of 70+ students. Our main challenge is having enough facility space on campus for the students. We can only have 36 students in a group because that’s the capacity of a majority of our labs. That really limits how many students we can have at one time (we have 4 groups of 36 which is where we get the magic number of 144).

The other challenge is funding. While we as directors don’t mind working for limited to no pay, it’s important that we recognize and value the time our STEM faculty presenters take out of their summers to help out with camp. We also fund a lot of scholarships to attend camp, so balancing scholarships versus students who pay to attend. We’re sitting really well right now thanks to our grant, but what will it look like to sustain it down the road? We’ve built partnerships with school districts which has helped out a lot. This year we also added a partnership with our city’s leadership network. They are interested in funding 10-20 scholarships a year for the camp which is phenomenal!

Overall we just want to continue to reach out to students, especially those that don’t normally have opportunities like this and those that haven’t had positive STEM experiences, and find ways to get them involved in STEM.

We had developed our own survey and then we came upon the STEM CIS that was very similar to ours and already validated, so we started using that last year. Here is the link to the validation article for the instrument – http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs111...

In terms of staying connected, that’s something we’re still working on! We want to continue our work via club model throughout the year. Our problem (a good one!) is that we have so many students interest in camp and follow up, that we don’t have the staff/faculty capacity/, time and resources to do a weekly event like we would like. We are hoping to do a monthly club event this coming year. Right now, our main component of connection is working with our area elementary and middle schools conducting family math, science, and STEM nights and days. We reach a very large number of our populations through these events, but want to be more targeted and strategic in the future :)

The biggest challenge you would initially think would be resources…like time, money or faculty capacity. But really our biggest challenge has been space. Our magic number for the maximum number of students we can host at camp in a week is 144. 4 groups of 36 students – 36 is the maximum of most of the classroom’s we’re in at UK and that we feel the students still get a high quality hands-on STEM learning experience. While this is a good amount of students and we’re very happy, it’s not enough to meet the demand. This year, camp filled up in the first 24 hours registration was open! A nice problem to have, but we feel really bad that we can’t offer the camp to everyone. We have goal numbers for our targeted populations and we’ve met or exceeded them each year, so we feel good that we are fulfilling our mission to broaden participation. However, we would love to offer camp to everyone who signs up! This year we did decided to add another week of camp, but we limited it to 72 just because we didn’t know if we would have enough help and for our own mental well being :) Even with offering camp to 216 students this year, we had to close our wait list because it reached 72 students!

We usually have one STEM Faculty presenter for a 3-hour session. They often times involve their own graduate students in the session, but we don’t require it. I tell you this because we don’t count on it or factor it into our ratio. For help on our end, we assign an inservice teacher as a lead on the group and one preservice teacher as a co-leader. (We pay these two as leaders) These are the 2 “in charge” of the group of 36. Then we have additional preservice teachers (graduate and undergraduate levels), inservice teachers, and doctoral students who help out. We have around 5 additional helpers per group. So about 1:5 ratio. We don’t like to go above 1:7. The average class size in our area is 32 students, so our teachers are able to handle larger sizes very easily :) For recruiting the volunteers, we give them nice polos (moisture wicking!), sport sack, USB drive, stylus pen, water bottle, parking permits for the week, and we feed them very well! Our volunteers love helping out with camp! They get to partake in the activities with the students and learn along with them. They also get to practice and hone their techniques and skills in an informal setting.

Sounds great — thanks much!