Board 182: Using of Esque Box for STEM Education of Pre-college Students (Work in Progress)

Wesley David Klehm; Pavel Navitski; Jordan Matthew Swan

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Poster Session
Tagged Division: Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE)
Page Count: 7
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--42557
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/42557
Download Count: 93

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Paper Authors

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Wesley David Klehm Oral Roberts University Engineering Program

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Wesley is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is 20 years old. Since he was a kid, he was always interested in how things worked and how they were made, with many disassembled toys to prove it. This curiosity inspired Wesley to pursue a degree in engineering to further satiate this desire. In 2021, Wesley Klehm and Jordan Swan founded Esque Box while students at Oral Roberts University to teach a new generation of kids what they wished they knew at the same age.

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Pavel Navitski Oral Roberts University

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Dr. Pavel Navitski is Associate Professor at Oral Roberts University from 01/2020 after a stint as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Oklahoma State University, where he was researching drift detecting using sensor systems for field spraying and guest lecturing. He is originally from Belarus, where he was the head of the department of agricultural machines at the Belarusian State Agricultural Academy. The Belarusian State Agricultural Academy is where he earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Navitski’s professional interests are mostly in modern agricultural machinery: setting the main types of agricultural machines for quality work; device features of configuration of new agricultural machinery; perspective cropping systems; precision agriculture; modern machines for chemical plant protection; renewability and bio-energy. He represents Oral Roberts University at ASME and Tulsa Engineering foundation.

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Jordan Matthew Swan

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Abstract

In today's changing educational environment around the world, teaching engineering disciplines is a challenge for both students and teachers. Early engineering education can be started from elementary school using STEM teaching methods. The Authors grew up with a passion for making and building but without the technical knowledge to do so. As engineering majors in college, the authors wanted to develop a way to simplify the concepts they now know and teach future generations what they wish they had known at their age. The Esque Box is a solution to that problem. The box is designed to give a hands-on learning experience through doing, not reading so that a visual, tangible representation of engineering concepts can be learned. There are many complicated aspects of engineering that aren't that complicated but can seem so, especially to pre-college students who might consider engineering a career. The Authors know because they faced those complicated concepts in the projects they worked on. The Esque Box solves this problem by giving real, applicable experience in a seemingly complex and out-of-reach topic, making engineering concepts more attainable for the average person and inspiring curiosity and Ingenuity. Additionally, the Esque Boxes are designed in such a way that they can be disassembled for the major components to be reused for other projects. The Esque Box was designed to be a launch point for creativity to take off, not the journey's end. The Authors have used the Esque Box to instruct children as young as 3rd to 8th grade in a classroom setting and a summer camp about simple circuit electronics using motors, resistors, breadboards, and LEDs. The Esque Boxes allow for the components (The breadboard, the motors, the resistors, the LED lights, the battery, the switches, and the wires) to be reused to experiment with building circuits outside the bounds of the project designed by the authors. This is the goal of the Esque Box: to initiate the inspiration to continue making and building, which forms the basis for a love and desire to pursue engineering. This creates greater interest and participation in the field. Students at the summer camp where the Esque boxes were built were surveyed at the end about building the Esque Box kit, how much information they learned, how interesting it was, and how useful it would be. Rated on a scale of 1 to 10, the students showed an average of 8.79 on the amount of information they learned, an average of 8.79 on how interesting building the Esque Box was, and an average of 8.48 on how useful the information was to them. The students left comments on their surveys that showed how the Esque Box inspired them to continue pursuing engineering and STEM in their lives. The ratings and the student comments show a need for more hands-on application of STEM concepts in school, and the Esque Box is primed to meet that need.

Citation
Format

Klehm, W. D., & Navitski, P., & Swan, J. M. (2023, June), Board 182: Using of Esque Box for STEM Education of Pre-college Students (Work in Progress) Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42557

TY - CPAPER
AB - In today&#39;s changing educational environment around the world, teaching engineering disciplines is a challenge for both students and teachers. Early engineering education can be started from elementary school using STEM teaching methods. The Authors grew up with a passion for making and building but without the technical knowledge to do so. As engineering majors in college, the authors wanted to develop a way to simplify the concepts they now know and teach future generations what they wish they had known at their age. The Esque Box is a solution to that problem. The box is designed to give a hands-on learning experience through doing, not reading so that a visual, tangible representation of engineering concepts can be learned. There are many complicated aspects of engineering that aren&#39;t that complicated but can seem so, especially to pre-college students who might consider engineering a career. The Authors know because they faced those complicated concepts in the projects they worked on. The Esque Box solves this problem by giving real, applicable experience in a seemingly complex and out-of-reach topic, making engineering concepts more attainable for the average person and inspiring curiosity and Ingenuity. Additionally, the Esque Boxes are designed in such a way that they can be disassembled for the major components to be reused for other projects. The Esque Box was designed to be a launch point for creativity to take off, not the journey&#39;s end.
The Authors have used the Esque Box to instruct children as young as 3rd to 8th grade in a classroom setting and a summer camp about simple circuit electronics using motors, resistors, breadboards, and LEDs. The Esque Boxes allow for the components (The breadboard, the motors, the resistors, the LED lights, the battery, the switches, and the wires) to be reused to experiment with building circuits outside the bounds of the project designed by the authors. This is the goal of the Esque Box: to initiate the inspiration to continue making and building, which forms the basis for a love and desire to pursue engineering. This creates greater interest and participation in the field.
Students at the summer camp where the Esque boxes were built were surveyed at the end about building the Esque Box kit, how much information they learned, how interesting it was, and how useful it would be. Rated on a scale of 1 to 10, the students showed an average of 8.79 on the amount of information they learned, an average of 8.79 on how interesting building the Esque Box was, and an average of 8.48 on how useful the information was to them. The students left comments on their surveys that showed how the Esque Box inspired them to continue pursuing engineering and STEM in their lives. The ratings and the student comments show a need for more hands-on application of STEM concepts in school, and the Esque Box is primed to meet that need.

AU - Wesley David Klehm
AU - Pavel Navitski
AU - Jordan Matthew Swan
CY - Baltimore , Maryland
DA - 2023/06/25
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Board 182: Using of Esque Box for STEM Education of Pre-college Students (Work in Progress)
UR - https://strategy.asee.org/42557
DO - 10.18260/1-2--42557
ER -