STEM Competition Recasts How Durham Middle Schoolers See Themselves

Tabetha Jones-Evans found herself in a pickle.

As a teacher and leader of career and technical education (CTE) pathways at Rogers-Herr Middle School in Durham, North Carolina, she had recently launched the school’s Rams Innovators technology club. With more interest from students than she could handle, the club brings almost two dozen middle schoolers together regularly to explore STEM activities and potential career pathways.

To keep the club official, however, the students had to participate in some kind of competition during the school year. But the only technology-focused event that Jones-Evans could find was at East Carolina University almost two hours away, and she didn’t have the funds to cover the costs of the trip.

Already partnered with Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, which provides mentors for the club, Jones-Evans found herself lamenting the situation to Shana McAlexander, assistant research professor of mechanical engineering and materials science (MEMS) at Duke.

“I was saying, to be honest with you, why do we live in the Research Triangle and we’re going down to Greenville to do this event,” Jones-Evans recalled. “And Shana said, ‘Why don’t you just do your own?’ And I said, ‘Ooookay…I will if you’re in it with me.’”

She was, and so were a wide consortium of faculty, staff and graduate students from Duke Engineering. The result of this simple question was the first annual “Innovation for Humanity” expo, which took place on Duke’s campus on Saturday, May 23.

Funded by Duke Engineering’s Community-Based Innovation Mini-Grants program and Duke MEMS, the event’s challenges were planned and coordinated by McAlexander along with George Delagrammatikas and Siobhan Oca, both professors of the practice in Duke MEMS. The resulting program brought together 14 competitive teams of students from three local middle schools: Rogers-Herr, Sherwood Githens and Neal. At the six-hour competition, teams took part in four STEM-based challenges connected to real-world issues:

• Create a short film on a local issue related to science or medical research
• Develop a maze-based computer game tied to an educational goal
• Design a small car to serve as a “Mars rover” transportation vehicle
• Engineer a pneumatic lift using simple hydraulics

Over the course of several months preceding the event, volunteers from Duke Engineering regularly visited the teams to introduce many of the ideas and concepts needed to complete the challenges. When the students showed up, however, they did not have any prior knowledge as to what the specific tasks would be.

For example, the pneumatic lift exercise challenged teams to use liquid motors made of tubes and syringes, sticks and other materials to build a robot arm that could move a “patient” in a hospital. Without any electricity, the exercise forced them to think critically and creatively about their designs, which all ended up very different from one another.

“I was really impressed by the students’ engagement, excitement and help-seeking skills, and they all ended up with projects they were proud of,” said Oca, who developed and ran the challenge. “It was an incredibly engaging event, and I would actually say the most intellectual engagement and excitement for one day from middle schoolers I have seen in this kind of event.”

That level of engagement and excitement was a sentiment shared by all who took part in the event.

Kayona Acheampong, a CTE teacher and department chair at Neal Middle School, whose team won three of the four events, noted how excited her kids were to have a competitive win they could be proud of.

“My school is more known for athletics, and a lot of times our more academic kids get overlooked,” Acheampong said. “This event gave them the opportunity to work as a team. And they were so proud of themselves, they all wore their medals the next day and are already talking about next year.”

Acheampong also noted how important it is to get kids interested in these types of subjects and potential careers while they’re in middle school. By the time they get to high school, she said, it’s important that they have some idea of the direction they want to go.

That is a message that also resonated with Darian Harris, director of career and technical education for Durham Public Schools. There is a common assumption, he noted, that middle schoolers aren’t ready for this event’s kind of work, and that STEM engagement is better left to high school, when students are more serious about their futures.

“But if we wait until high school to introduce them to technical problem-solving, we’ve missed an important opportunity to shape how they see themselves,” Harris said. “I believe our students left this experience with a different sense of what they are capable of. Events like Innovation for Humanity expand what students believe is possible, and I think our students and teachers felt that.”

“I’ve heard from many parents about just how impactful this was for their kids, that it caused them to feel like they could be a part of something great,” Jones-Evans echoed. “Throughout this whole process, Duke has been phenomenal on another level. We hope to make it a yearly event after seeing the impact it has had on our community and students.”