This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by engaging in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences.

The goals of the project are to motivate the participation of middle school students in urban and rural settings to pursue STEM and computing (STEM+C) careers. The project will develop an integrated curriculum that supports the learning of computing and engineering fundamentals through the underlying mathematics concepts. The after-school learning experiences focus on authentic work of computer engineers, student learning about computer programming, engineering design, and mathematics concepts.

There is a growing need for citizens to be able to work with data and consider how data is represented. This work employs a design, make, play framework to create data modeling learning experiences for young children and their caregivers in an informal setting. The project will develop and test a curriculum for a workshop series for 5-8 year old children to engage them in playful exploration of data modelling. Children will engage in data collection, data representation and data analysis drawing their own experiences of the world.

The Literacy for Engineering Access and Participation Conference (LEAP) would convene researchers and teachers from the engineering education, literacy education, equity and other stakeholder areas to establish a research agenda and gather resources related to the literacy considerations for informal and formal learning settings. The conference participants will learn about engineering and literacy perspectives that impact students' learning with a particular emphasis on multi-lingual students and engaging a more diverse student population in engineering.

There has been a strong push to expand the opportunities for students to experience Computer Science (CS) instruction in schools across the nation. To support the work at the federal, state, local levels and engage others in the effort, there is a need for coordination across these sectors. The current complex landscape does not have a central organization or connection point, thereby leaving many local education agencies (LEAs) unsure of how to proceed.

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by investigating ways to make science assessment and science instruction more culturally relevant to Native Hawaiians.

The three-year "COMmunities Educating Tomorrow's Scientists (COMETS)" project is implementing an earth and space science program with the focus of learning science as inquiry through Marshall University, with partners NASA IV&V Educator Resource Center, Kanawha County Schools, Bayer Crop Science Corporation, and the West Virginia Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences. COMETS targets 200 low-income, underrepresented and minority students at five community centers in Charleston, WV, for inclusion in a NASA-centered informal science education program.

The project will research the effects of single-gender computer science (CS) camps and gender aligned role models within that context. During the past 30 years, there has been a decrease of women earning computer science degrees and entering the CS workforce. To reverse this trend, there has been a surge of girls only programs for recruiting and mentoring girls in CS. Despite their popularity, however, there exists only minimal research on the efficacy of these programs to grow the population of women in CS and little is known about the most effective ways to implement these programs.

This is a collaborative proposal among the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Virginia Tech, and Purdue University, submitted to the Successful Project Expansion and Dissemination strand of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program.

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by employing mobile technology to help up to 530 teachers and more than 9,000 students use proven retrieval experiences to improve STEM learning.