Abstract
Engaging underrepresented populations of women and minorities in engineering represents our greatest untapped resource for increasing the STEM workforce and its productivity. Guided by the research that shows that students' performance and experience in a first course in the discipline is predictive of retention of these students, we are adopting Merit workshops into our Introduction to Electronics course (one of our department's first-year courses). Merit workshops engage students in collaborative learning communities to improve students' sense of belonging in the department. In this work in progress paper, we will describe how we implemented our Merit workshops and provide some preliminary evaluations of the workshop.