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2024 NSF ITEST PI Meeting Project Summaries
Welcome to the ITEST Project Summaries Library! These one page artifacts were created to share information and unpack project work across the three ITEST pillars 1) Innovative Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning, 2) Partnerships for Career and Workforce Preparation, and 3) Strategies for Equity in STEM Education.
We invite you to search, filter, and explore these pages—and add comments to engage with your colleagues!
The AAMASE project develops and researches a model for engaging high-school-aged African American women from low-income families in STEM-related making and entrepreneurship educational programming in a makerspace. Participants explore multiple Making disciplines (e.g., ceramics, textiles, resin, woodworking and metalworking) and entrepreneurship. New pathways to STEM careers open for these young women as they make connections among their strengths and interests, and the knowledge and skills…
This project will promote data literacy in high school students by engaging them in learning about the Quantified Self, the practice of using technology to track and reflect on one’s own biological, behavioral, physical, and/or emotional data. Learning activities will be designed to spark a broad interest in science and to help develop students? informed opinions about the role of human-generated data in public life. To achieve this goal, the project will develop and test software tools as well…
This project is an informal STEM intervention that combines partnerships between STEM and education faculty at the University of Houston with mentorship from the participants’ families and STEM undergraduate mentors to provide hands-on STEM experiences to fourth and fifth-grade students of color. The project aims to increase awareness of and interest in STEM careers and broaden participation in STEM careers. Program components include hands-on activities that engage students with technology…
The WATERS project addresses the need for water education and career readiness by developing and researching a universally accessible, student-centered curriculum that employs Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. This approach ensures that learning about water quality, usage, and stewardship is accessible to all students, enhancing their understanding of and engagement with vital water issues. Through hands-on activities, local data, and geospatial analysis, the curriculum aims to…
STEM Tales is a 2.5 year research project focused on the creation of a new children’s media series (titled Book Drop) which focuses on STEM learning, literacy, and careers. OUTREACH: STEM Tales outreach is designed to engage children (ages 4-8) and families through in-person programming at 21 libraries across the nation. In each library program, families view one episode of Book Drop, learn about the career of the book reader, and engage in hands-on activities that focus on important STEM…
Data Jam is an initiative of the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Schoolyard program. The Luquillo LTER at the University of Puerto Rico has collected decades of data about the El Yunque rainforest ecosystem and made that data publicly available. The Data Jam program engages middle school and high school students in the process of asking their own questions about environmental phenomena in El Yunque and then in exploring, analyzing and summarizing the long-term data as evidence to…
Biology Meets Engineering provides transdisciplinary education to prepare students for a future in STEM. We have developed and hosted a 3-week summer program on campus, through which high school students in and around Cincinnati have applied the fundamentals of sensory biology, robotics, and computer programming. An undergraduate course expands upon knowledge gained in the summer, and we provide paid internship experiences in university STEM labs. We developed a curriculum that integrates…
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into advanced manufacturing has promising potential to revolutionize productivity and generate new jobs in smart manufacturing. There is an urgent need to investigate "what to teach" and "how to teach" AI in order to prepare future workforce with the necessary AI skills. This project will initiate an age-appropriate career-driven AI educational program for high-school students and evaluate its effectiveness. We will develop…
Our project addresses the critical shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals and the lack of diversity in the field, highlighted by a projected 31% increase in information security analyst roles from 2019 to 2029 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and a tripling in the demand for cybersecurity roles since 2013 (Burning Glass). We aim to spark interest in cybersecurity careers through mixed-reality (MR) learning activities for middle school students, focusing on foundational cybersecurity…
Integrating Students’ Interests, Identities and Ways of Knowing with Network Visualization Tools to Explore Data Literacy Concepts is a Developing and Testing Innovations project responding to the growing recognition that data literacy is an increasingly important set of skills and network science in particular is at the heart of today’s youth’s experiences with technology. The goal of this project is to explore a synergistic approach in which middle school students (7th and 8th grades) use…