EDC to Lead Co-design of Maker Activities for Youth in Care Facilities

EDC has received an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to co-design, test, and nationally disseminate STEM-focused maker activities for youth aged 12-18 who spend significant amounts of time in hospitals and other medical care facilities. The activities will promote youths’ STEM learning and career interest and be accompanied by guidance materials for child life specialists who support learning and well-being in care facilities.

Over the next three years, EDC and partners The Franklin Institute and Bank Street College of Education will collaborate with youth who have spent substantial time in care facilities and child life specialists to develop and refine the maker activities. EDC will also conduct research to advance knowledge of whether and how maker activities support the STEM agency, interest, and understanding of youth participants.

“Hospitals are living STEM laboratories that offer tremendous opportunities for informal science learning,” says Wendy Martin, EDC Principal Research Scientist and the project’s Principal Investigator (PI). “This project will give young people hands-on experience with  the science, technology, and medicine around them to enhance their out-of-school time STEM learning and spark their interest in future careers in the STEM innovation workforce.”

Out-of-school STEM learning opportunities have been shown to play an important role in fostering interest in STEM, as well as preparing young people with the skills and concepts needed to participate in a rapidly changing workforce. Yet to date, there have been few efforts to develop informal STEM learning opportunities for youth in care facilities.

According to the 2021–2022 National Survey of Children’s Health, 6% of youth between the ages of 10 and 17 in the United States—1.5 million adolescents—have special healthcare needs. Some adolescents in this group experience complex chronic physical and developmental conditions, such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and sickle cell disease, which require extended hospital stays. Research has found that these youth drop out of school at a much higher rate than the general student population.

During the project, PI Martin and co-PIs Andrea Brothman and Sam Tumolo (EDC), Jayatri Das (Franklin Institute), and Genevieve Lowry (Bank Street College of Education) will:

• Conduct research on which maker activity formats and topics are feasible for youth with a range of different conditions and durations of stay in care facilities
• Create and implement three STEM-based maker activities with and for youths
• Develop an activity guide and accompanying videos for child life specialists and others
• Train child life specialists on how to use the activities and videos to engage youths in making and STEM learning

At the end of the project, the team will widely disseminate the activity guide and videos to child life specialists, care providers, informal STEM educators, and other audiences nationwide to advance the integration of STEM maker opportunities across hosptials and other settings.

The new project builds on EDC’s successful NSF-funded IDEAS (Inventing, Designing, and Engineering for All Students) maker program that builds informal educators’ capacity to engage students with a range of abilities in engineering activities (view curricula).

We invite you to explore EDC’s STEM Education and Workforce Development initiatives.