This project aims to advance science-based STEM+C education and teacher training models with the addition of location-based curriculum for teachers and students in computer science topics and STEM+C career exploration.
The AI Play project is investigating how to introduce AI concepts via digital game design activities to middle grades students and teachers through workshops, camps, and school-based programs in rural communities of North Carolina.
The project engages high school students in exploring science-based climate scenarios and co-creating an interactive digital narrative. Project research investigates outcomes related to the project goal to improve STEM career aspirations among Latinx teens.
We will collaborate with 3 annual teacher cohorts (80 teachers total) from Florida Title I middle schools to develop innovative STEM curriculum. This will be done via week-long summer PDs, scientist-teacher partnerships, periodic virtual sharing and planning meetings, and standards-based curricular instruction during the school year. Our project activities integrating fossil sharks and AI will reach at least ~2K to 4K students each year.
This project addresses access to STEM educational experiences for rural students. Students from rural areas and small towns make up about 30% of the U.S. secondary school population but often lack inspirational STEM educational opportunities and experiences. This makes them less likely to pursue
Given the importance of broadening participation in the field of computing, goals of supporting personal expression and developing a sense of belonging must live alongside the goals of conceptual knowledge and developing disciplinary expertise. Integrating opportunities for students to be creative in how they enact computing ideas plays an important role when designing curricula. We examine how student creativity, as expressed through theme and the use of costumes, backdrops, and narrative in Scratch projects, is affected by using a themed starter project. Starter projects are Scratch projects
Civic-science integrates science knowledge with civic practice but differs from the citizen-science prototype by reframing science as a public good and citizens as both recipients of and actors in policy. We draw from our studies of a civic-science model in which adolescents (majority African-American) collaborate with teachers and community partners to mitigate an environmental problem in their urban community. Based on students’ reflections on what they learn from these projects we have developed Environmental Commons theory, referring both to the natural resources on which life depends and
Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that was influenced by Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The purpose of this article, apart from promoting transparency of program design, was to evaluate the effectiveness of our camp design in terms of increasing youths’ interest, self-efficacy beliefs, and
This work is part of an ongoing partnership that seeks to create a sustainable infrastructure to support GIS-infused instruction in a large urban school district. In this paper, we report an illustrative cross-case comparison of two teachers’ approaches to infusing GIS in their courses. The goal of this analysis is to examine how GIS-infused instruction is adapted in different contexts and to consider the affordances of divergent approaches. Findings illustrate the relationships among organizational context, individual and collective context, particularly teacher identity, and instructional