Engineering Buddies: Bringing Geotechnics to Sixth Graders in an Out-of-School Time STEM Program

The Engineering Buddies program introduces engineering content to middle school students and exposes them to various STEM careers. The faculty, undergraduate, and graduate mentors expose middle schoolers with malleable minds to role models that are relatable and spark curiosity. Faculty and student mentors from four universities visited 19 classrooms across two New Mexico school districts to share their educational path and geotechnical research and create connections with over 700 sixth-grade students in a four-year period. This paper describes and makes available the curriculum, materials, and implementation of an Out-of-School Time program that partners with faculty and students from several universities who serve as role models while introducing middle school students to geotechnical engineering content. The instructional materials, mentoring structure, strategies used, and lessons learned are described.