Going Beyond Demonstrations to “Chose Your Own Adventure” Engineering Experiences

The enthusiasm of STEM teachers and early exposure to STEM fields has been shown to strongly influence a student’s selection of engineering as a major/career.  Due to the somewhat abstract and often hazardous nature of chemical engineering compared to other engineering fields, it is often difficult to create engaging chemical engineering experiences for K-12 students.  To help address this issue, my students and I have created over 50 demonstrations which we have been presented to over 3,000 K-12 students.  We have focused on hands-on interactive demonstrations that use as many senses as possible; however, feedback from our experiences has inspired us to modify our approach to involve a higher level of active learning.  Here we present our efforts to create open-ended, hypothesis-driven, “chose your own adventure” chemical engineering experiences that are safe, fun, inexpensive, and easily tailored to elementary, middle, or high school students.