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Abstract It is an exciting time in STEM education as more technologies have become affordable and readily available with online support structures and forums. Teaching and engaging the younger generation of students to encourage a pathway to STEM is still of importance to our national STEM efforts and is easier now with these available technological tools. However, there remains a barrier to entry as many available technologies or kits require a well-versed person in the areas of engineering, technology, or science to understand and follow the instructions. In this paper, we report on a self-contained project kit platform for hands-on learning in outreach programs and experiential environments that overcomes barriers to entry in electrical engineering education. These kits, referred to as, "Project in a Box" or PiB kits, teach a myriad of electrical engineering topics, including, basic control theory, robotics, circuits, electronics, and programming. The step-by-step manual with 3D visual aids and comments, allows untrained students, parents, and faculty to follow along given the provided kits. We have successfully deployed PiB kits in courses, programs, outreach workshops, public library workshops, and faculty outreach training seminars. The target demographic of these kits ranges from middle school to high school. We highlight our results from our flagship Family Program and community outreach in this paper. The Family Program and Library Program deploys these kits through a series of workshops aimed at raising awareness in STEM for parents and children and encourage teamwork in families through hands-on. Both programs encourage participants to become the teachers of their community further proliferating the efforts to encourage STEM. Assessment is measured by percentage of completed kits, as completing the kits demonstrate competency in the target learning areas and ability to recreate the projects as intended. Based on over 25 workshops and over 100 recurring participants, we have over 85% success rate of completion. The instruction manual features 3D visual aids, simple instructions and explanations, comments, and clear steps. We highlight the instruction manual as a platform for scaling and replicating these programs in other universities and programs. Finally, we discuss future outlook on outreach to propose pipelines to increase reach efforts in the context of our future collaborations with the San Diego Library Network and the Institute of the Americas STEAM Programming for South America. In summary, we present a hardware platform for self-paced learning and outreach in electrical engineering. We utilize the context of a unique Family Program and Library Program to provide potential deployment avenues in which electrical engineering departments may benefit from building community, gaining visibility, and expanding their outreach efforts when using the kits.
Truong et al. (Tue,) studied this question.