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.

The increasing sophistication and availability of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies wield the potential to transform how we teach and learn computational concepts and coding. This project develops a platform for creative coding in virtual and augmented reality. The Embodied Coding Environment (ECE) is a node-based system developed in the Unity game engine. It is conceptualized as a merged digital/physical workspace where spatial representations of code, the visual outputs of the code, and user editing histories are co-located in a virtual 3D space.

This project is a multiyear study of the impact of an enrichment program that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) managed in the 1990s. The Young Scholars Program (YSP) involved around 18,000 7th–12th grade students and 600 separate grants between 1989 and 1996. The purpose of YSP was to introduce high-achieving middle and secondary school students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to encourage their entry into those fields and thus increase the size and quality of the nation’s STEM workforce.

Healthcare is becoming robotics reliant. Hands-on learning of assistive and rehabilitation robotics in meaningful contexts such as improving quality of life will broaden the participation of underrepresented students including females and ethnic minorities.