Instead of beginning with potential ways in which the DECtech program can be improved, I’d first like to highlight the components that have allowed the program to succeed thus far. First, the fact that the classes are taught and run by female college students is imperative to its success. These instructors and teaching assistants serve as role models for the girls they teach as they are all pursuing high level STEM educations. Additionally, “facilitators play a critical role in participants’ engagement, achievement, and retention” (Mosatche et al., 2013). Another important component that ensures the DECtech programs success is the use of collaborative and hands-on activities. This keeps students engaged and interested in the topics. Despite all the positive components of the DECtech program as is, the program could be improved in multiple ways, which have been split up into the categories of recruitment, scheduling, online learning, and additional activities.
Recruitment
Recruitment is an essential part of a successful STEM outreach program. One place that a parent noted during their interview that would be a great place to recruit girls for DECtech would be girl scout troops. Girl Scouts has STEM, which DECtech instructors could help a troop achieve by visiting during one of their meetings. This would serve as both a recruitment opportunity and an outreach event. Another way to continue recruiting girls is by having volunteers from DECtech visit classrooms to talk about STEM and their experience at Colorado School of Mines. By visiting schools, hopefully the younger girls will see the college students and think that could be them some day.
Scheduling
Scheduling was the number one issue with past participants not returning to the program. While we can’t do anything about how busy kids are now, we can do our best to offer sessions at the best times. With enough enrollment, there is the potential to offer multiple class times each day. Through this, parents who want their kids to attend earlier classes could come during the earlier slot and others during the later slot. Additionally, this would ensure classes would stay small.
One possible conflict some parents highlighted was how different ages are offered on different days and at different times, which was difficult when they had multiple children who attended. A potential fix to this problem would be offering different age groups on the same day at the same time. The structure of DECtech would change a bit, as both instructors and teaching assistants would be grouped with one age group, instead of the teaching assistants switching between ages. While this may sound like it would lead to a pretty chaotic drop off and pick up situation, there would still be a floater in charge of check in for all of the students and teaching assistants would make sure to keep everything under control. Also, if the classes were split into two sessions a day, then there would be less students in each session.
One idea that was written about in the surveys by multiple students was offering more sessions. One problem we’ve seen is parents forgetting to bring their daughters to Mines for their DECtech sessions, as a result of their only being four classes. Therefore, it is possible that offering more sessions would increase enrollment, as well as allow for more complex projects for all of the age groups.
Another option is to implement a pilot of DECtech on the road at a school near Golden. This program would remove the hassle of students having to drive to Mines for DECtech sessions, which was one reason for some past participants not returning. After determining how successful the pilot is, the program could either be extended or discontinued.
Online Learning
One of the largest challenges with online learning, other than technical difficulties, is the removal of the “small talk” that typically occurs at the beginning of classes. For DECtech, the girls usually have a chance to run around and play games outside before class starts; however, with classes online they aren’t able to talk to each other without talking to everyone or being put into breakout rooms. In a paper on the analysis of the impacts of online learning, Barbour and Plough looked at the benefits of using a safe social networking platform that allowed fully remote students to connect with each other (2009). While I don’t propose using this in DECtech, I do think including more interaction between students would be beneficial. This could be done by doing collaborative activities or putting students together in breakout rooms while working on individual projects so they can socialize. Especially for the students who are also going to school fully online, the amount of time they spend interacting with peers has likely diminished immensely.
After the end of the pandemic, decisions will need to be made across the board about what stays online and what moves back to in person. I propose that while the in person sessions of DECtech are more valuable, the continuation of one online section of each of the younger age groups would allow better access to the program for participants who live farther away. This would increase access to the program and I believe would be important to continue.
Additional Activities
The incorporation of additional activities between sessions could further students' ability to learn from the DECtech program, as well as allow them to do more exploration on the topics taught in their own time. One way to do this would be to have instructors plan an extra activity that they could introduce at the end of each session or could be emailed to parents. This could include more research on a topic, videos to watch, or another project. While it was discussed to possibly have students share their project at the beginning of the next class, one potential issue is if some students missed the previous class they would feel left out. Regardless of the way in which this idea is implemented, I think it would be beneficial to implement.
Sources
Barbour, M., & Plough, C. (2009). Social Networking in Cyberschooling: Helping to Make Online Learning Less Isolating. TechTrends, 53(4), 56-60. doi:10.1007/s11528-009-0307-5
Mosatche, H. S., Matloff-Nieves, S., Kekelis, L., & Lawner, E. K. (2013). Effective STEM programs for adolescent girls.