Build a Better Book Teen Internships: Connecting Technical Work to Social Needs

Poster

The Build a Better Book Teen Internship Program engages teens from underrepresented groups in an empathy-driven, professionally structured engineering design internship focused on the design and fabrication of accessible products for children who are blind or visually impaired. Participating teens gain technical and STEM workplace skills, and broaden their perception of engineering as a social and collaborative discipline with potential to improve people’s lives.

Read More

CS Frontiers: Beyond CS Principles: Engaging Female High School Students in New Frontiers of Computing

Poster

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.

Read More

Developing STEM Identity in Rural Audiences through Community-Based Engineering Design

Poster

This project creates community-based engineering design experiences in advanced manufacturing aimed to build STEM content knowledge, identity and interest in STEM careers among underrepresented rural middle school (grades 6-8) students. The project also explores the impact of professional development on rural middle school teachers' STEM content knowledge, self-efficacy and awareness of STEM careers.

 

 

Read More

Peering a Generation into the Future: NSF's Young Scholars Program (YSP) and the nation’s STEM workforce

Poster

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.

Read More

Engaging Teachers and Children in the Physics of Waves through the Connections with Music

Poster

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.

Read More