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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1589296
This article is part of the Research TopicRural STEMM Education Research: Bridging between Uniqueness and UniversalityView all 5 articles
Enhancing rural students' perceived relevance and career interest in engineering through 3D printing
Provisionally accepted- University of South Carolina, Columbia, United States
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This convergent mixed methods study explored the impact of a 3D printing curriculum on the rural students' perceived relevance of engineering and their career interests in engineering jobs. By embedding 3D printing within a rural-focused educational framework, this research investigated how rural high school students' perceived authenticity of learning and their career interests in engineering could be enhanced by hands-on making processes driven by 3D printing. The findings underscored the potential of rural-focused approaches, when combined with universally applicable technology like 3D printing, for supporting rural students' learning and action-oriented outcomes in STEM education.
Keywords: Rural education, stem education, Engineering career interests, Perceived relevance, 3D printing
Received: 07 Mar 2025; Accepted: 02 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tang and Qian. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hengtao Tang, University of South Carolina, Columbia, United States
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