The CISTEME365 project headquartered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hypothesizes that experiences with cutting-edge technology must exist all year-round to effect significant improvement. Thus, the fundamental project goal is to enable middle and high school Underrepresented Students (URSs) in STEM (female, underrepresented minority, and/or low-income) to participate in sustained, intensive, hands-on STEM learning experiences.

This project advances a Career & Technical Education employing a Horizontal Learning Model (HLM) integrates knowledge/skills across multiple technology areas within an authentic practice. The HLM organizes learning expansively through a series of graduated projects that allows students to contextualize learning across fields by integrating skills and knowledge across constituent domains progressively.

Project Overview: Advance robot-mediated learning in schools and investigate how collaborative tele-robots can facilitate optimal learning experiences.

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.

We create and study virtual simulations of peer collaboration in STEM fields, designed for youth in informal learning environments. Practice with the simulations will help teens from underrepresented groups build collaborative skills and career interest in STEM fields, especially those that use mathematics and require strong teamwork.

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.

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.