Impact of a Year-round Out-of-School Maker Program on Minority Middle School Boys (Work in Progress)

摘要

African-Americans, Hispanics, and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. As shown in Table 1, for the African-African population, which is the focus of this paper, males are 5.6% of the population but only 2.9% of the engineering workforce while females are 6.4% of the population and 0.7% of the engineering workforce, although they are 3.6% of the workforce when science and engineering are considered. In contrast, White and Asian men are overrepresented in engineering. Due to the significant underrepresentation of white, black and Hispanic women in engineering, a number of National organizations and initiatives provide extra-curricular opportunities to expose girls to engineering and computer programming [1]-[3]. While some academics and organizations are working on the underrepresentation of minority males in STEM, few National engineering and computing programs targeted at minority males in middle school were available at the conception of this effort in 2014. Partnering with Minority serving institutions, The Verizon Foundation has funded 12 programs to address the gap in engineering and computing programs for low-income minority males in grades 6 - 8, living in urban and rural areas. This paper provides preliminary results from the first year of the program at a single institution.