The purpose of this study was to investigate how the engineering design based STEM research experience affects the gifted students'' engineering problem solving propensity and attitude toward engineering. The students’ engineering problem solving propensity and attitude toward engineering were measured before and after the STEM research experience using already developed instruments by Kang & Nam (2016) and Moon (2009) respectively. The pre-post tests result were analyzed by paired t-test with the significance level of p <.05. The conclusion of the study is as follows. First, the engineering design based STEM research experience had a positive effect on the students’ creative engineering problem solving propensity. Over all, the average score of the creative engineer problem solving propensity increased significantly (p <.05) after the STEM research experience. The analysis of five sub-categories (motive, engineering design, engineering thinking habit, engineer, communication and collaboration ability) shows the same result (p < .05). Second, gifted students’ attitude toward engineering had positively changed after the integrated STEM research activities The attitudes toward engineering instrument consisted of five sub-categories; ‘interest in engineering’, ‘difficulty in engineering’, ‘impact of engineering’, ‘school curriculum related to engineering’, and ‘''engineering and occupation’. The score of every sub-category increased significantly (p <.05) after the STEM research experience. Third, we analyzed the difference of the results based on the gifted students’ desired career paths (natural science and engineering). In the pre-test, there was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the average score of the sub-categories, ''communication and collaboration ability'', ''interest in engineering'' factors and ''attitude toward engineering'' (p <.05). However, there was no significant difference between the groups in the post test result. Fourth, we also analyzed gender differences in the two measurements before and after the STEM research experience. In the pre-test of creative engineering problem solving propensity, there was no significant difference in all sub-category by gender. However, in the post-test results, there was a significant difference (p < .05) in the sub-category of ''engineering design''. In the pre-test of attitudes toward engineering, there was a significant difference (p <.05) in the sub-category of ''impact of engineering''. However, there was no significant difference by gender in all sub-category after the STEM research experience.