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.
The connections with music present a great opportunity for engaging children in the science of sound, and science in general. With this goal, our program has been creating a series of web applications and hands-on activities that allow children to explore, visualize, and play with sound. Our previous work, carried out in the classroom with heavy involvement of our team, showed that the approach was effective for increasing children’s engagement with science.
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 AAMASE project is developing and researching a model for engaging high-school-aged African American women from low-income families in STEM-related making and entrepreneurship educational programs.
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.
A STEM education program at the interface of biology and engineering, namely sensory biology and robotics. This program for high school students and in-service teachers engages them in activities that examine the interrelatedness between science and engineering using innovative technologies.
BOAST is an out-of-school time online engineering program to support Baltimore City high school students develop concrete goals of becoming engineers by supporting foundational math skills and math self-efficacy through hands-on design and application.
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.
The Role Models in Elementary Engineering Education has been studying the interactions between elementary students and outreach ambassadors (undergraduate engineering students) in informal outreach setting. The project used surveys, interviews and classroom video recordings to expand our understandings about how engineering outreach is enacted and how students' perceive that experience. The findings to date have expanded knowledge about what matters to students and the role they see ambassadors filling. The project has produced new survey instruments as well as tools that