Empowering underrepresented groups to excel in STEM through research sprints

Learning today is increasingly contextual, embodied, and on-demand. New modes of empowerment through technology are reshaping where, when, and how learning occurs. Research sprints are an integrative, fast-paced, active learning experience emphasizing creativity, collaboration, and communication in which teams "sprint" to find the information needed to solve a design or research challenge. The participants must work together to harvest the information and synthesize it through appropriate visuals in presentations and via social media channels (e.g. Mendeley and Twitter). Two workshops were given during the Summer of 2017 entitled, "Self-Healing Infrastructure," to a cohort of female underrepresented minority (URM) middle school students participating in Girls Inc and a group of URM high school student participating in the Franklin Institute STEM Scholars program. The session's design created a context for students to (i) actively harvest research information using engineering library databases, such as Compendex on Engineering Village, (ii) gain hands-on experience observing healing of concrete by bacteria, and (iii) synthesize and present their findings via graphical abstracts, all in a compressed timespan of 3-4 hours. The graphical abstracts produced by these cohorts provided visual insights into learners' research pathways from online to laboratory work.