Chapter 9: Strategies to Engage Female and Hispanic Youth in Robotics in the Southwestern United States

Informal learning settings offer the potential to stimulate interest, initiative, experimentation, discovery, play, imagination, and innovation in learners. Engaging adolescents in activities where they are free to design and innovate on their own can be useful in sparking their curiosity and interest in new fields. Female and minority youth used robotics kits to engage in technological problem-solving experiences. Learners were presented with an engineering design challenge focused on an authentic life-science context and introduced to technologies where solutions are achieved via an actual project. This chapter offers an alternative approach to engaging students traditionally under-represented in the STEM fields.