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.
The project's central goals are threefold: (1) to provide access to meaningful bilingual computer programming and mathematics (CPM) experiences to Latinx middle school students, (2) to develop a bilingual CPM curriculum based on Python and Jupyter Notebook to provide visual representations of mathematics concepts, and 3) to prepare and work with teachers through interdisciplinary teams and action research to integrate CPM into the school curriculum.
This project aims to adapt the Geospatial Semester for Career and Technical Education in a large urban district through effective teacher professional development and lesson design.
Project eSPAC3 aims to develop upper-elementary students’ spatial computational thinking skills and awareness of computationally-intensive careers by designing an immersive Latinx culturally affirming enactive learning experience in Minecraft Education Edition which emphasizes family engagement, near-peer mentorship, peer collaboration and expert modeling.