Abstract:

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) permeate relevant innovations to global competiveness of enterprises and nations. Workforce faces an alarmingly shortage of employees with STEM skills, driven the importance of STEM education. STEM education considers the integration of STEM disciplines in authentic contexts, which requires concepts’ connections and real-world applications. STEM education has also a valuable characteristic of developing critical skills as curiosity, inquisitiveness, critical-thinking, innovation and problem-solving.

In order to encourage children and youth to pursue STEM subjects and gather STEM careers, STEM education has to be introduced in every grade continually. Actions on young age can have a lasting impact on learners and contribute to their success in STEM fields. Unfortunately, there is not yet equity in STEM education for minorities, especially women, who have been historically underrepresented in STEM jobs. The importance of recruiting more women is essential for attending high demands of STEM qualified professionals, as well as to promote creativity and productive in teams due to the diversity aspect.

Moved by the need of STEM education and the existing female gap in STEM, we are been conducting a program called ‘Women in STEM’ for three years. The program is held in an Engineering school in partnership with a health-care company. The female group in charge of the program includes undergrad students, professors and a communicator professional. The program aims to present STEM to girls of middle and high schools, in order to introduce STEM concepts and encourage girls to pursue STEM careers. The program also focuses on our undergrad students, aiming to foster their development in STEM.

We recognize the challenging aspect of promoting STEM education, mainly due to the need to scale and deal with distinct contexts. It is then needed to promote the creation of new programs as well as to strength existing ones. We then initiated a going-to-scale approach aiming to increase the coverage of our program, by spreading with the community our efforts, successes, and ideas to inspire future work. One way of sharing knowledge is through the dissemination of lessons learned. In this paper, we present our initiatives and discuss lessons learned during the three years of the program. Our initiatives include: lectures, mentoring, workshops, technical projects, events, divulgence, and network. Lessons are related to the coordination of the program, the engagement of students, and the conduction of specific initiatives.

Although gender aspect is an essential component in our program, the discussed directives can be applied to STEM programs in general. Moreover, such lessons can be useful to other public outreach programs with similar characteristics, for instance those with interplay among undergrad students, professors, and students from middle and high-schools. We expect that the presented lessons learned can aid the creation of new programs and the improvement of existing ones. It is expected that practitioners can select lessons aligned to their specific goals and context, and then they can adapt their actions to achieve better results.

Keywords:

STEM education, female participation, project, lessons.