Lend-a-lab

Across the US, women pursue STEM careers at lower rates than their male peers. Research suggests that this trend starts early, with girls from middle school to college scoring lower on tests of mathematics and science achievement and reporting lower levels of interest and confidence. Within Milwaukee, WI specifically, 4th grade girls score at similar levels to their male peers on state science tests. However, by 8th and 10th grade, these levels drop, with roughly 36% of girls testing as proficient or higher compared to 43% of boys who test as advanced. Thus, the middle school years seem to be a key time when girls tend to lose interest and fall behind in STEM achievement. Given the middle school population of Milwaukee (roughly 20,000 students), this translates to a loss of roughly 1,000 female STEM students per year. Given the predominantly male enrollment in extracurricular STEM programming, we focus on supporting and enriching in-class learning experiences in an attempt to reduce the STEM gender inequity.

STEAM Milwaukee’s Lend-a-Lab program is both a resource library and teacher learning hub to support hands-on, in-class STEAM activities. We have a collection of hands-on kits and materials (e.g., classroom sets of 10 LEGO Spike Prime robots, micro-controllers, scientific probes and sensors, math activities, a portable MakerCart) that teachers can rent for 2-6 weeks at a time as well as lesson plans, teacher slides, and student handouts to support classroom implementation. We are working to connect these kits and classroom materials to local STEM career opportunities, both as a funding mechanism and to establish STEM career pathways for students. We maintain, organize, deliver, and collect the materials, saving schools and teachers the time and money and reducing the environmental impact of these often electronics-based kits. We also offer teacher learning opportunities - both in professional development workshops and more individualized consulting - to help teachers feel confident taking these materials into the classrooms and using them with students. By working to reduce barriers to implementation, we aim to increase the number of engaging, hands-on STEAM learning experiences available to students. Specific offerings and more information are available at our website: https://www.steammilwaukee.com/

Our solution serves teachers and students in Milwaukee, WI. The students and schools we most seek to serve are those who otherwise don’t have consistent access to high-quality STEM experiences. We especially seek to reach girls with these in-class activities, as girls are less likely to participate in extracurricular STEM activities. In our region, the highest-need schools are mainly in the City of Milwaukee and adjacent suburbs, with potential to explore smaller rural districts and independent schools. To understand the needs of these students, our team lead is a classroom teacher with 9 years of experience who has implemented many of the same experiences we provide with her own students. By observing how students interact with our materials and soliciting and responding to direct feedback from them, we have iteratively strengthened the experience for future students and teachers that utilize our equipment. 

As an educator and researcher, we also recognize that adult learning is crucial to successfully implementing new classroom experiences, especially when equipment involves computers and other electronics. In leading professional development, we provide teachers with ample time for hands-on exploration - encouraging them to be learners again. We pivot these teacher learning experiences into discussions of how, concretely, they will frame and implement these experiences for their students in upcoming lessons. We work to provide template teacher slides, hand-outs, and assessments that teachers can modify to best fit their own practice. 

We further engage students, teachers, and school leaders in providing feedback on our work. In addition to roughly 150 student surveys about their in-class experiences, we survey teachers before and after each rental and following professional learning events to learn how our offerings can best suit their needs (roughly 50 responses to date). We have also interviewed more than 40 teachers, school administrators, and corporate outreach professionals to understand their needs around linking students’ STEM learning to career pathways. We plan to continue to gather feedback from teachers and school leaders on the needs of their classrooms while also tending to the desires of students in the experiences and career explorations they value. 

Our team lead is a middle school educator in Milwaukee, WI, who identifies with the community we aim to serve: educators and students at schools that lack access to the materials necessary for high-quality, daily engagement with STEM. She understands the freedoms and constraints teachers face in accessing resources to use with students as well as the challenges that may exist due to varying school priorities. She can further attest to teachers' desire to grow in support of educating a more future-ready workforce while facing the real challenge of managing the responsibilities present within one’s daily work with students. 

Our co-founder is also a Milwaukee native. As a researcher designing and studying hands-on STEM learning, she is well positioned to translate the latest developments in students- and teacher-learning into our model’s offerings.

We work to understand the needs of the Milwaukee educator community through participating in community events, which draw us into natural conversations with educators who stop at our booth to explore our hands-on materials, leading teacher professional development sessions, and collecting feedback before and after students and teachers work with our materials. We discuss school-wide and STEM priorities with school leaders while at the same time asking teachers about these topics. This helps us to match the materials and experiences we provide with their needs. We have previously gathered community input through communities of practice that met after school and on weekends. While teachers attended these sessions, we learned that their timing was a burden and prevented others’ participation. For this reason, we began partnering directly with schools and meeting teachers during the school day at existing professional development times.One STEM teacher we spoke to emphasized the stresses of piecing together “whatever [she] could find” after transitioning from a science teaching role. Her desire for a cohesive, problem-based curriculum led us to prioritize teacher-facing resources (e.g., lesson plans, slides, student hand-outs) alongside the physical materials to reduce the lift in teachers in implementing hands-on STEM activities. 

This past Spring, we also interviewed 42 people - school principals, teachers, community mentors, students, industry representatives, a school network president, and a former superintendent – to understand their STEM education, career initiatives, and community partnership work. This feedback reinforced our hypothesis about the value for schools of connecting daily STEM learning to career opportunities. By directly partnering with teachers, we can continue to ensure that our solutions fit their subject’s standards and provide meaningful experiences for them and their students.

To date, we have lent materials to 22 teachers at 16 schools, reaching over 1,000 learners. We have also run professional development sessions with more than 2 dozen teachers and open, hands-on build sessions with over 1,500 community members at local fairs, farmers markets, and other similar events.

In the past, we have found structured, early entrepreneurship programs to be vital in moving the project forward, especially as we are building capacity in the “nights and weekends” phase. We seek to work with and learn from the MIT Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures communities as we explore a new business model and a personalized but more streamlined customer acquisition process to drive scalable, sustainable growth.  

If selected to participate, we would seek additional support addressing financial, technical, legal, and market barriers. The financial support provided would increase our ability to partner with teachers (via honoraria and research compensation) and technical partners (e.g., a videographer and web developer) as we design, test, and iterate a business model that is not entirely grant-funded. While the prototype we seek to test is not technical, we anticipate distributing the prototype resources through a digital platform, pending results of a pilot career-linked unit. To date, we have sought limited legal advice on two main issues: intellectual property in the context of licensing an in-house designed geometric figures building kit and fraction game as well as  transitioning from a sole proprietorship to a nonprofit.  We anticipate the need for future legal advice on creating contracts that define partnerships, on responding to liability risks within our model, and on developing robust plans for school-related product safety in implementing materials with students. Finally, we could use support evaluating the industry-side market fit of the corporate sponsorship element of our business model. If this model is successful, we would benefit from the program’s support in developing plans to scale throughout the state and region. 

Outside of the growth that we seek, we appreciate the value provided by peer to peer networks. We have developed and joined such networks within the Milwaukee education community and value the opportunities they provide. We seek to play an active role within the MIT Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures communities and are eager for coaching, reflection, learning, and change opportunities that further our shared mission of increasing girls’ access to high-quality STEM experiences.

Our team lead is a middle school educator in Milwaukee, WI, who has worked for nine years within the community we aim to serve: educators and students at schools that lack access to the materials necessary for high-quality, daily engagement with STEM. She understands the freedoms and constraints teachers face in accessing resources to use with students as well as the challenges that may exist due to varying school priorities and classroom dynamics. She can further attest to teachers' desire to grow in support of educating a more future-ready workforce while facing the real challenge of managing the responsibilities present within one’s daily work with students. Our team lead is a life-long resident of the greater Milwaukee area and is directly connected to many educators we seek to serve in our community.

Our lend-a-lab model consolidates and centralizes acquisition, maintenance, organization, and distribution of the physical supplies needed for hands-on STEM learning and makes more efficient use of these materials by sharing them across schools. Our model also reduces teachers’ overhead by providing the materials (e.g., lesson plans, slides, handouts) needed to integrate these activities into a school curriculum. Finally, our model aims to reduce the cost to schools with a corporate sponsorship model that links hands-on STEM learning to local STEM career pathways.

While lending physical materials is geographically limited, we believe our curricular materials and career-linked corporate sponsorship model - should it prove successful - could be shared more broadly. We are currently aware of 8 other resource libraries for teachers (Edwardsville, IL; Fresno, CA; Green Bay, WI; Ithaca, NY; New Orleans, LA; Pittsburgh, PA; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA). Our career-linked corporate sponsorship model could help these existing libraries expand their offerings or improve their sustainability. It could also ease the establishment of new resource libraries. We could also license and share our curricular materials with these institutions to better serve more girls in STEM learning.

Within one year, 85% of girls who participate in our program will indicate increased affinity for STEM subjects and desire to enroll in a future STEM course. To achieve this, we will partner with five schools or female-focused afterschool programs to provide high-quality, hands-on STEM experiences to at least 750 female learners. We will also co-design problem-based experiences - and corresponding professional development materials - based on student and teacher needs and desired standards alignment. 

At the same time, 85% of participating girls will also indicate increased knowledge of STEM careers and preparation required for them. To achieve this, we will partner with five local companies to create direct career connections, including video tours and interviews, that accompany students’ hands-on, in-class experiences. When designing these career-linked units, we will especially elevate female STEM practitioners in Southeastern Wisconsin, likely by deepening our existing relationship with Women in Technology (WIT Wisconsin) to highlight women who work in STEM-aligned small businesses in our community. In the future, we hope to leverage these relationships into a formal mentoring program, something desired by many school personnel we interviewed and a valuable component shared by successful skills-development programs. 

Within five years, participating girls will demonstrate 55% higher enrollment in high school STEM courses compared to their non-participant peers. We will obtain this longitudinal data through the National Clearinghouse. High school STEM enrollment acts as a gatekeeper to later STEM learning (Blickenstaff, 2005), so shrinking the gap between girls’ and boys’ STEM course enrollment in high school is a critical step to achieving greater gender equity in the STEM workforce.

Increased teacher satisfaction is another key outcome of our work. Within one year, 80% of participating teachers will indicate increased satisfaction in their hands-on classroom instruction or in student engagement. We will measure these impacts through surveys before and after teachers implement our materials. We will also include interested teachers in the design of our materials through a collaborative participation process, supported by honoraria. By empowering teachers through co-design, we ensure the materials reflect and directly center their needs and voices. 

References:

Blickenstaff, J. C. (2005). Women and science careers: Leaky pipeline or gender filter? Gender and Education, 17(4), 369–386.

We collect teacher feedback in pre- and post-rental surveys, allowing teachers to quantify their satisfaction with the number and quality of hands-on activities their students experience. To further explore teacher experiences, we also ask teachers to rate their confidence in selecting and implementing hands-on and technology-based activities with their students as well as to select types of supporting materials (e.g., video tutorials, coaching time, in-class support) they would have found useful. We also solicit questions or suggestions about the rental material so as to improve the supports that accompany each unit. 

Following in-class experiences, we collect de-identified student data to assess pre and post-activity skills growth, opinions, and feedback as well as interest in STEM and awareness of STEM careers. A potential future area of growth is to list specific target skills for each materials kit or unit (e.g., students will accurately record and analyze collected data from the community) to achieve greater specificity about the outcomes students achieve through each experience. By listing skills and collecting pre- and post-unit data about student achievement in those skill areas, we work towards achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 4, Target 4.4 (“By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs, and entrepreneurship.”). In the long-term, we will use National Clearinghouse data to measure participating students’ STEM course enrollment in secondary and post-secondary education. This data will help us determine if participating girls’ persistence in STEM matches our goal of a 50% increase in STEM enrollment.

Students

For participating middle school girls, we anticipate that hands-on activities will increase their engagement in STEM classrooms, growing their curiosity about and confidence in STEM domains and, as a result, prompting higher STEM course enrollment during high school (Young, et al. 2017). 

We expect that career-linked STEM activities, especially those featuring female STEM professionals, will increase participating girls’ awareness of STEM careers and females’ contributions to those fields. This increased awareness could, in turn, boost girls’ affinity for STEM careers and their curiosity about the preparation required for such work. In the long term, we expect participating girls to gain a deeper understanding of the educational pathways that lead to STEM careers and to more readily envision themselves within those fields. 

We also hypothesize that increased awareness of female professionals in STEM careers will create an affirmation effect for participating girls, increasing both STEM enrollment (Mouganie & Wang, 2020) and interest in STEM careers.

Teachers

For teachers, we expect that providing prepared hardware and curriculum materials will decrease the time they spend preparing hands-on STEM activities for their students and increase the engagement they observe among their students. In the medium term, we anticipate teachers may demonstrate increased confidence and willingness to implement hands-on activities in the classroom, evidenced by increased rental frequency and higher ratings on post-rental surveys (supported by to-date pilot results). In the long term, we hope these positive experiences will translate to increased job satisfaction and retention within STEM teaching roles. 

References:

Mouganie, P., & Wang, Y. (2020). High-performing peers and female STEM choices in school. Journal of Labor Economics, 38(3), 805–841.

Young, J. L., Ero-Tolliver, I., Young, J. R., & Ford, D. Y. (2017). Maximizing opportunities to enroll in advanced high school science courses: Examining the scientific dispositions of Black girls. Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research, 13, 174–183.

We know that high-quality, hands-on classroom activities improve student engagement, identity, and interest in STEM (e.g., Christensen, et al., 2015). Some of the classroom kits we provide - including Lego SPIKE Prime Robots, Adafruit Circuit Playground Express Boards, BBC micro:bits, Google’s AIY Artificial Intelligence Voice and Speaker build kits, and 3D printers - involve students in exploring emergent STEM topics and skills. Leveraging hands-on materials to explore these technologies creates relevance for students in ways that app or browser-based platforms do not. Other items teachers may check out include large scale graphing tarps, our in-house designed GeoKit to explore concepts related to geometric figures, and a maker cart. Students who are able to work with these tools are empowered to not only learn concepts, but to apply them in tandem with human-centered design in order to solve problems. 

Our next area of exploration incorporates video interviews and virtual tours of local STEM businesses directly connected to students’ hands-on design experiences in the classroom. This will broaden students’ awareness of STEM careers and increase their understanding of the educational pathways to these roles. To further increase awareness about these career pathways, we also plan to develop relationships with local apprenticeship and vocational programs, technical colleges, and universities so that middle school students can see how their near-peers in local post-secondary programs navigated career decision-making processes.

We are currently registered as an LLC but are in the process of converting to a non-profit, with paperwork to be filed in June.

We are a team of two who currently both work on this project part-time and recently transitioned from a “nights and weekends” schedule to 40% time on the project.

The Team Lead founded STEAM Milwaukee in March of 2021 and was joined by the second team member in Fall of 2021.

As two women in an entrepreneurial STEM role, we are aware of and actively work to combat the gender disparities that exist within STEM education and professional fields. 

STEAM Milwaukee was born out of a frustration with the inequities in Milwaukee’s educational landscape. Milwaukee county - our home region - has high racial diversity, with the population split roughly equally by thirds into White, African American, and Latina demographics. However, these groups are highly geographically segregated. Schools with the resources to provide hands-on, high-quality STEM experiences serve predominantly white, middle- and upper-class students. The majority of schools that serve African American and Latina students are under-resourced. Our work is committed to supporting equity in STEM education by bringing high-quality, hands-on STEM activities into classrooms where such materials are not otherwise available. In our curriculum design efforts, we work to create materials that reflect the diversity of local voices so that students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, can see themselves in STEM. 

We also acknowledge that Milwaukee sits on the traditional, unceded homeland of Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples, who were forced by colonizers to leave their ancestral land. Especially as we build curriculum around earth and water science, we will work to honor and elevate ongoing indigenous land and water stewardship practices, including current work by The Ho Chunk Nation and Kickapoo Valley Reserve related to our upcoming storm water collection unit (Bence, 2023). 

Additionally, as we explore ways to amplify students’ experiences in the classroom, we recognize the value of voices who represent our community and our students. We have found value in exploring the nuances of our own different faith traditions as we work to create more equitable experiences for students.

As two white educators, we are especially careful to seek input and feedback from teachers and students representing and well-versed in the needs of Milwaukee’s diverse learners. As we look to grow our team, we will work to include a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, life experiences, and identities, knowing that our workplace and impact is better for it. To us, inclusion is a foundation and prerequisite for learning. 

References

Bence, S. (Director). (2023, April 27). Reserve tucked in southwestern Wisconsin holds natural and indigenous treasures. In Environmental Reporting. WUWM.

We rent prepared, hands-on STEM materials and curriculum to subscribing teachers and schools, reducing the time and money they spend obtaining and organizing these materials and increasing the availability of high-quality, in-class STEM experiences for their students. We also provide group professional development, individual implementation coaching, and in-class support at an hourly rate, increasing teachers’ skills and confidence to implement these activities in the classroom. To keep our services accessible to all schools, we are pursuing a sponsorship model with local, STEM-related businesses; we tailor curriculum materials to reflect their work, building positive community relations and incremental revenue in exchange for the business funding materials purchases, design time, and teacher training. This partnership also highlights local STEM careers, offering educational value to participating students. Finally, we have secured grant funds for one-time purchases of particular hands-on equipment and pilot implementations. 

In the short term, we plan to continue writing small- to medium-sized grants to fund the expansion of our materials catalog. We are also pursuing local, STEM-related business sponsorships to fund the design and professional development time needed to implement career-linked units in classrooms. In the long run, we anticipate that school subscription fees will cover maintenance and replacement costs for rented materials. We will likely still rely on the occasional grant for large equipment purchases. Our goal is to fully fund our curriculum design and day-to-day operations through local business sponsorships and through professional development fees, for which schools tend to have more allocated budget dollars. Should this business sponsorship model prove successful, we could also license it (and any designed materials) to other resource libraries around the country. 

To date, we have secured $35,000 dollars in total grant funding from organizations including FOR-M, 4.0 Schools, and VELA Education Fund. We have one school contracted with us for the 2023/2024 school year, subscribing for middle school science curriculum materials, professional development workshops, and consultation time. We will also work with a second school's summer school program this year and are in talks to finalize agreements with one additional school and one after school program.