The major objectives of the UNLV ITEST project are to: 1) enhance secondary female students’ academic self-concept in computing and engineering fields through a constructivist learning environment; 2) enhance secondary female students’ knowledge, skills, and interests in these fields; 3) increase the number of secondary female students’ participation in STEM competitions; 4) investigate the factors that influence female students’ career choices in STEM/ICT fields.

EdAI investigates how best to prepare teachers to implement the Developing AI Literacy (or DAILy) curriculum in regular school day classrooms. We seek to understand what supports and teaching practices are effective and necessary for middle school teachers to implement the curriculum and positively impact student’s learning if AI.

We are investigating a “convening AI” that brings together teachers and students to troubleshoot around machine-selected excerpts of student work-in-progress. Our initial domain is middle school virtual robot programming.

The Connected Spaces (C/S) (DRL #2048852) project is researching and developing a technological toolkit and design framework to connect youth makers with peers, mentors, and technical assistance. Makers tinker, design, create, and invent, often working with peers in makerspaces equipped with traditional materials and tools as well as with 3-D printers, electronics, computer design and other technologies. The project is designed to connect prospective and geographically distributed middle and high school makers who are underrepresented in STEM with peers, mentors, and technical assistance.

This Synthesis project uses meta-analysis and qualitative synthesis to examine the effects of integrating innovative technologies into K-12 STEM education on students’ STEM career-related outcomes, and if and in what ways intervention characteristics and educational settings moderate these effects.

The New Hampshire Academy of Science ITEST grant began Sept. 1, 2022 and will enable wrap-around programming to provide underrepresented students in underserved rural communities with scientific research experiences along with mentorship and college prep throughout high school, starting at each grade level. We are currently developing recruitment strategies for our first two cohorts. 

Our goal is to provide a cloud-based programming environment for students with blindness and visual impairments (BVI) to learning computer programming and machine learning. This programming environment includes a novel screen reader that can read programming statements in more comprehensible styles and a voice-based code navigation to assist debugging.

The goal of this project is to investigate best ways to prepare the youth to confront future science and engineering problems. A team of educational researchers, science teachers, and scientists investigate the design of educational digital environments to promote engagement, interest, and learning in computation and science. Middle school aged learners are presented with science problems inspired by real-world challenges that are hard to solve and particularly suited to computational solutions with creative thinking skills.

This one page summary presents the work over the past year as we have transitioned from home-based instructional settings back to in-person and hybrid-settings in the context of engaging our partner youth in learnign about coding, transparent soil, and novel technologies.

ImageSTEAM is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded program designed to help introduce AI and computer vision concepts to middle school students through the development of innovative learning activities in visual media. Our focus is on encouraging students to pursue careers and interests in STEM and empowering teachers to train the next generation of students for the upcoming AI technologies that will feature prominently in the 21st century.