A co-authored project is a collaborative initiative in which multiple individuals or groups contribute ideas and resources to create something together. Each participant has an active role, adding insights and skills to the project’s development and outcome. It fosters a sense of shared responsibility and ownership over the results, making everyone involved a ‘co-author’ of the final product. Many advantages are related to co-authoring, including skill complementarity, shared decision-making, enhanced learning, improved problem-solving, and greater purpose relevance. Such features aid the development of projects with increased reach and impact while promoting the sustainability and continuity of the partnership over time.

Co-authoring benefits many areas, especially those requiring diverse expertise and community engagement, for instance in education, public health, sustainability, social services, and urban planning. Specifically in education, a co-authored project can involve multiple voices (such as teachers, students, parents, community members, and other partners) to ensure that educational programs are more relevant and tailored to real-world needs. This paper presents a co-authored initiative between a high school and a university to provide a programming workshop using a mobile laboratory. A mobile lab is an equipped lab that can be transported to different locations to provide hands-on educational experiences. The benefits of a mobile lab include technological accessibility to places without traditional lab facilities and the flexibility to support distinct activities and needs.

Our co-authored initiative included two teams, one in the school and the other in the university. The school team has teachers and representatives of the freshmen for whom the workshop was designed. Their participation was critical to sharing local insights and expectations. The university team integrates professors and undergrad students. Professors helped guide the workshop building and coordinate the usage of the mobile lab. The undergrad students effectively created the workshop by bringing fresh perspectives and experiences to make the workshop content more relevant and engaging. Students were also responsible for running the workshop, being a kind of inspiration for young people.

Aiming to assess the experience of those involved in the co-authored project definition, we asked some questions in a way to understand if the co-authoring aspect brought valuable ideas, enriched the workshop design, allowed the workshop customization according to kids’ needs, promoted a sense of shared ownership, and improved their appreciation of a joint effort toward education. We also investigated the participants’ vision of the advantage of the mobile lab and their satisfaction in participating in a project that contributed to the community.

The way the workshop was designed considered programming activities in Scratch to be made by the high school students with the assistance of the university students, having then a co-authoring aspect itself. So, we evaluated the freshmen’s journey considering, for example, if they enjoyed incorporating their ideas, expressing their creativity, collaborating with instructors,and perceiving the range of possibilities. By sharing our experience in this paper, we aim to promote the potential of co-authoring to create more impactful educational projects due to the strengthened connection of participants on behalf of a meaningful goal.

Keywords: Education STEM, Co-Authored Projects in Education, Women in STEM2D.