This ITEST-Alabama (Developing and Testing Innovations: DTI) project aims to advance efforts to better understand and promote practices that increase minority high school students' motivations and capacities to pursue STEM careers. This project engages students in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences in fields of computing, specifically in cybersecurity.

Project Overview: Advance robot-mediated learning in schools and investigate how collaborative tele-robots can facilitate optimal learning experiences.

The project is guided by three goals: (1) iteratively design a set of concrete and interactive MR activities addressing key cybersecurity concepts (e.g., steganography, phishing, and firewalls) with teacher and student input throughout the design process; (2) increase student knowledge of key cybersecurity concepts, understanding of the importance of cybersecurity, and interest in cybersecurity careers; and (3) produce a set of design principles for MR activities in computing.

Communities of color across the nation face increasing challenges with affordable access to safe drinking water. Using data science to explore why, where and how this is happening, and what is being done about it, provides a powerful vehicle for the engagement of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and to help develop a digital work force with appropriate representation from the affected communities.

We create and study virtual simulations of peer collaboration in STEM fields, designed for youth in informal learning environments. Practice with the simulations will help teens from underrepresented groups build collaborative skills and career interest in STEM fields, especially those that use mathematics and require strong teamwork.

Building on the foundations set by the AP Computer Science (CS) Principles course, this project seeks to dramatically expand access, especially for high school girls, to the most exciting and emerging frontiers of computing, such as distributed computation, the internet of things (IoT), cybersecurity, and machine learning, as well as other 21st century skills required to productively leverage computational methods and tools in virtually every profession.

CS Frontiers is a new high school computer science curriculum designed to dramatically expand access, especially for high school girls, to the emerging frontiers of computing, such as distributed computation, the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, and software engineering.

This project will develop and study measures of culturally responsive-sustaining education (CR-SE) in computer science (CS)—providing vital tools and evidence to inform the growing CS education field.

Relatively little research exists on the use of experiences with physiological sensors to support STEM education. In this work, we draw on techniques from physiological computing and computer science education to explore novel ways to build students' computational thinking skills.