Baxter Online STEM Student Challenges

The Baxter STEM Challenges are based on lessons and activities developed for the Baxter STEM Academy, a residential summer program that tasks high school students with some of Baxter Biopharma Solutions’ (Bloomington, IN) most vexing challenges. The academies were designed to foster a supportive, interactive, and engaging learning community for underserved and underrepresented students, many of whom were interested in STEM and eager to learn, but may not have had the opportunities to engage in activities that supported their career interests.

The challenges are designed to increase student interest and engagement by utilizing authentic, industry-led STEM tasks. The project also integrates feedback from professionals at Baxter Biopharma Solutions to help provide students with connections and role models for college and career trajectories.

The challenges have been developed to be immersive STEM learning experiences that are designed to help engender deeper interest and possibly commitment to pursuing STEM-related career pathways, which will ultimately contribute to addressing the issue of underrepresentation in STEM career fields.

Preliminary data from the Baxter STEM Academies suggests that the Baxter STEM challenges increase student interest, awareness, and content knowledge of STEM.

About Baxter

Every day, millions of patients and caregivers rely on Baxter’s products. For more than 85 years, they have operated at the critical intersection where innovations that save and sustain lives meet the healthcare providers that make it happen. With vaccines, technologies, and therapies available in more than 100 countries, Baxter builds on the company’s rich heritage of medical breakthroughs to advance the next generation of transformative healthcare innovations. Now you can join the Baxter Team and help solve some of their most vexing challenges to produce and deliver medicines and vaccines.

About the Challenges

Access to healthcare, medicines, and vaccines are widely available in the U.S., saving people’s lives every day. Yet, in developing countries, a lack of access to healthcare, medicines, and vaccines put people, and particularly children, at high risk of disease. Although there are numerous challenges to providing healthcare to developing countries, getting viable medicines and vaccines to countries-in-need is often the most difficult. Medicines and vaccines often need to travel long distances from manufacturers—like Baxter Biopharma Solutions—to where they are distributed all over the world. Without proper manufacturing and delivery, medicines and vaccines themselves can be ineffective or even deadly.

To produce, transport, and administer vaccines, companies like Baxter Biopharma Solutions must solve the following challenges: (1) be able to freeze-dry and reconstitute products; (2) be able to maintain sterile environments in their laboratories; (3) continuously monitor their products along every step of the process – from manufacturing to administration. These difficult tasks provide the foundation for the Baxter STEM Challenges.

The Baxter STEM Challenges are a series of videos co-created by the Indiana University School of Education and Baxter Biopharma Solutions. They are intended to be implemented with students in both formal and informal learning environments, in school or at-home, in groups or individually. These challenges will task participating students to make informed science and engineering decisions.

This project is generously funded by the Baxter International Foundation. For more information, please contact Dr. J. Adam Scribner, Director of STEM Education Initiatives at IU School of Education, jascrib@iu.edu.