Promoting Collaboration and Empathy in an Arts-Based STEM Engagement Pilot with K-12 Tribal Students

This poster focuses on a pilot engagement activity implemented in 2024 with students ranging in age from elementary to early high school at a rural tribal school in the Midwest. Students worked in small groups on creative STEM activities designed to be empathy-driven, collaborative, and personally meaningful. Two of the activities are the focus of this poster, Avatar Making, and Sphero Bots, both of which aimed to foster empathy, critical thinking, and computational exploration among the K-12 student participants who were attending a summer enrichment program at the school. In Avatar Making, students worked in groups to create an avatar who was a fictional character representing the experiences and feelings of a new student at their school. The Sphero Bots activity introduced coding and simple robotics through a visual coding interface and an analog obstacle course design. The activity was designed to encourage iteration, experimentation, and teamwork while allowing space for artistic expression. This poster provides observations from the pilot activities and early evidence of how such engagement work may be a useful method to nurture technical and social-emotional skills among similar students in other educational settings. The design strategies utilized highlight the potential of combining creative tools with STEM-focused content to support inclusive, student-centered learning. Questions for further research have been developed based on the pilot study.