STEM education plays a critical role in shaping students’ science learning experiences and influencing their future career choices. However, building early STEM identity in under-resourced settings remains a critical challenge, where teachers often contend with growing class sizes, lack of support, diverse learning needs, and students’ language barriers, which can relegate hands-on science below other priorities within the curriculum.

This study examines the impact of STEM Try Five, a university-led access initiative to support the delivery of STEM in primary schools identified as being in areas of socioeconomic disadvantage. The Try Five project consists of five interdisciplinary workshops - microscopy and fair science, ecology and biodiversity, basic electronics, renewable energy, and rocket science - including ready-to-use, practical, low-cost resources that are provided to all students and teachers.
 
Using a quasi-experimental, single-group pre-post design, the project engaged 288, 9-10-year-old students across seven schools in Dublin. The SMQ-II its subscales were used to measure the shifts in science motivation, including intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, self-determination, grade motivation, and career motivation, while end-of-session student engagement surveys and teacher feedback were given as supporting evidence.

The overall SMQ-II motivation scores revealed a slight but significant decline following the intervention, which may reflect students’ recalibrated understanding of STEM challenges through hands-on experience. However, the self-determination scores increased significantly among female students. Although boys initially reported higher autonomy levels, this gender gap in self-determination closed by the program’s conclusion, suggesting an equalising effect of the intervention on students’ perceived agency in STEM activities. Qualitative feedback and engagement surveys corroborated these quantitative trends: students maintained high levels of interest and motivation, constructed and retained individual projects, and engaged in peer-supported group work.

These findings suggest that a thoughtfully packaged suite of hands-on, theme-based STEM projects—backed by equitable material distribution—can sustain engagement, bolster motivation, and eliminate autonomy gaps among early learners. We discuss three key implications for practice and research: strategies for packaging and distributing the toolkit for widespread adoption; recommendations for refining the SMQ-II for younger cohorts; and core design principles for equity-driven university–school partnerships in primary STEM education.

Keywords: STEM Motivation, Space, STEM, Gender equity, Hands-on learning, Education, Primary Education, Educational Equity, Science.