ITEST Symposia at AERA

News

The AERA Annual Meeting is the largest gathering of scholars in the field of education research. It is a showcase for ground-breaking, innovative studies in a diverse array of areas -- from early education through higher education, from digital learning to second language literacy. It is where to encounter ideas and data that will shape tomorrow's education practices and policies, and where to connect with leading thinkers from the U.S. and

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Competitions inspire STEM learning through innovative project

News

On May 31, 14 teams of middle-school students in the San Diego area competed in the final round of a tournament that drew both family members and public audiences. Rather than a sporting event, this was an engineering challenge that called on participants to work through the process of designing, testing and redesigning wind turbines to see which team could harness the most electricity.

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Students explore STEM careers in Botball competitions

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Battle lines were drawn inside Mission Bay High School’s gymnasium as students from San Diego County competed in the 2014 Botball Assistive Robotics Sand Diego Regional Tournament on March 29. The tasks, to have Botball students develop effective robot technologies to solve state-of-the-art problems.

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Using Flowchart Programming to Create Exergames

Publications

Exergaming activities demonstrate how technology could be used as an instrument to reduce the impact of this disease. One can purchase commercial, technology-based exergames such as Nintendo Wii Fit or Xbox Kinect games; however, the authors developed a custom exergame using Phoenix Contact’s Nanoline microcontroller and nano Navigator software flowchart. The beauty of the flowcharting software is that people who have no or little programming experience can easily understand its structure.

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Scratch for Arduino: Exergaming Development

Publications

Currently, obesity has become one of the major health concerns in the United States. A way to relieve this problem is creating fitness activities using the technology and tools available at hand. “Punching Pad” is a prototype that utilizes Scratch for Arduino software and the Arduino Board to make this possible. This device is not only considered a viable fitness activity, but also it could help to inspire children to build other gadgets that, in fact, would facilitate the acquisition of programming skills and basic electronics concepts.

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STEM program builds ties between Stanford and East Palo Alto middle school

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An innovative course and afterschool mentor program bring lessons from education, design and engineering to a local school. The program complements the charter school’s science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) offerings in a low-pressure, afterschool environment. Focusing on teaching design solutions that emphasize empathy, it has reached about 60 EPAPA students over the last three years, with some returning for a second year.

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Shoot For The Moon! The Mentors and the Middle Schoolers Explore the Intersection of Design Thinking and STEM

Publications

This paper describes the journey of a group of university students as they worked with underserved middle school students as mentors in a STEM-based afterschool program. Design thinking provided a frame within which students learned how to be mentors, how to create user-centered learning experiences, and how to share their experiences as developing STEM professionals with middle school students.

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Looking for Learning in After-School Spaces

Publications

In this study we examined three after-school settings for 8 weeks focusing on storyboarding, chatting on a social network site, videotaped conversations with volunteer facilitators, presentations the youth made at the end of the program, and structured interviews with researchers to look for evidence of learning in afterschool spaces.

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Interest-driven STEM Learning among Youth through a Social Networking Site

Publications

Engaging middle school youth in STEM curricula resulting in desired conceptual changes is challenging. Furthermore, social media are identified as platforms where youth naturally congregate for sustained interaction. Studio STEM was designed as an after school programme to engage learners (ages 11–15) in design-based science inquiry within a studio environment, enhanced by social media and digital tools. In the highlighted curriculum, Save the Penguins, youth performed scientific experiments and engineering practices to design an enclosure to protect penguin-shaped ice cubes from rising

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