The STEM 3D approach draws on evidence-based research demonstrating the proven ability of informal environments to act as an entry point to STEM and 21st Century skills for elementary-aged youth, as well as the value of involving significant adults and local communities when providing STEM learning opportunities for minority youth.
UMass Dartmouth will host the New England Regional for the 2014 Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicle (ROV) Competition, Saturday, May 3, 2014, at UMass Dartmouth's Tripp Athletic Center. The New England Regional ROV Competition is one of more than 20 regional contests that take place across the United States and Canada, and in Hong Kong, Scotland, Japan, and Egypt.
Hundreds of students go to Balboa Park for the annual RoboExpo. The expo included thirty exhibits, and 700 kids registered for the event. Many of the expos involve robots that can do different tasks.
In Chula Vista, about 100 middle school students used seaperches - remote-controlled waterproof submersibles - to study sharks at the Living Coast Discovery Center. The seaperches are equipped with cameras to get an up-close look at sea life. The event was part of the SDSU STEM initiative to give
This online event will showcase cutting-edge NSF-funded work to improve teaching and learning and will allow colleagues affiliated with MSPnet, CADRE, CIRCL, CAISE, STELAR, CS10Kcommunity, and ARC to view, discuss, and comment on each others’ work. It will also allow each project to disseminate their work to the public at large, helping NSF achieve its goal of broad dissemination of innovative work.
The development of analytical skills is a central goal of the Next Generation Science Standards and foundational to subject mastery in STEM fields. Yet, significant barriers exist to students gaining such skills. Here we describe a new “gentleslope” cyberlearning strategy that gradually introduces students to the authoring of scientific simulations via a Web-based modding approach called CyberMOD. Modding involves adding agents with predefined functionality to a simulation world to produce a unique combination whose behavior can then be visualized by running the simulation. This permits low
In this paper we lay out our strategy of our Scalable Game Design curriculum, which has been funded through a series of NSF (ITEST Strategy, CE21 Type II, and ITEST Scale Up) grants as well as the Google CS4HS program, and list some research questions relevant to bringing Computer Science education to middle schools.
The STEM College-Going Expectancy Scale (STEM CGES) was developed and validated in two studies conducted during 2010 and 2011. The STEM CGES is a self-report instrument measuring college-going expectancy, specifically for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains. In Study 1, 95 students in an urban high school completed an 11-item online questionnaire to measure college-going expectancy in STEM domains. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) retained 6 out of the 11 items for inclusion. In Study 2, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) used data collected from 658 students in
Future school science standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), emphasize the integration of simulation and modeling activities in the classroom environment. The extremes of these activities have two vastly different implementations. On one hand, a teacher can have students experiment on a pre-made simulation associated with the material. On the other hand, students can use, for example, an end-user programming tool to create the simulation from scratch. This allows students to not only experiment on, but also, to model the real world phenomenon being studied, a key
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.