STEM Sea, Air, and Land Remotely Operated Vehicle Design Challenges for Rural, Middle School Youth

The STEM SEALs program at North Florida College explores methods for improvement of teaching and learning STEM in rural areas. It consists of three disciplines, “Sea”, “Land”, and “Air”, and three phases, design, review and summer institute for each of the disciplines.
 
 Research data were acquired from both groups, educators and students. They show how the program accomplished 100 % engagement of the students and almost full engagement of the teachers. One outstanding result is that the community of practice, formed between local middle school teachers and community college faculty resulted in a significant increase of self-efficacy in explaining when teaching computational thinking.