Resources

This manuscript is part of a larger project and is an inter-disciplinary effort, dedicated to discovering answers to the following questions: 1) Do storytelling and story making serve as effective means to teach computer science to middle school youth? And 2) Can the integration of computing skills into the core middle school curriculum increase instruction and student learning of these skills? A description of how our project supports equity in the classroom introduces the reader to a new teaching concept that combines Indigenous narrative “Storytelling” with computer science components. We

One significant barrier to broadening participation in engineering and recruiting future engineers is the pervasive lack of understanding or even misunderstanding of what engineering is and what engineers do. The challenges to broadening participation in engineering are further complicated as underrepresented groups often report constructs, such as cultural milieu and outcome expectations, as more important than interest in influencing career choices. Addressing such issues is difficult and single exposure interventions are unlikely to make engineering careers seem more relevant or attainable

Less than 30% of students enrolled in the U.S. are proficient in science or mathematics. The landscape becomes more troubling among students who traditionally are underrepresented in STEM. For instance, in 2015, fourth grade Black students scored on average 24 points lower than their White counterparts, and 35 points lower than their Asian American counterparts. When data are disaggregated further by sex, underrepresented males, Black males in particular, underperform Black girls on fourth grade mathematics assessment. Additionally, underrepresented males who graduate from high school complete

Our NSF-funded ITEST project focuses on the collaborative design, implementation, and study of recurrent hands-on engineering activities with middle school youth in three rural communities in or near Appalachia. To achieve this aim, our team of faculty and graduate students partner with school educators and industry experts embedded in students’ local communities to collectively develop curriculum to aim at teacher-identified science standard and facilitate regular in-class interventions throughout the academic year. Leveraging local expertise is especially critical in this project because

The paper introduces the problem of robust head detection in collaborative learning environments. In such environments, the camera remains fixed while the students are allowed to sit at different parts of a table. Example challenges include the fact that students may be facing away from the camera or exposing different parts of their face to the camera. To address these issues, the paper proposes the development of two new methods based on Amplitude Modulation-Frequency Modulation (AM-FM) models. First, a combined approach based on color and FM texture is developed for robust face detection

Human activity classification remains challenging due to the strong need to eliminate structural noise, the multitude of possible activities, and the strong variations in video acquisition. The current paper explores the study of human activity classification in a collaborative learning environment.This paper explores the use of color based object detection in conjunction with contextualization of object interaction to isolate motion vectors specific to each human activity. The basic approach is to make use of separate classifiers for each activity. Here, we consider the detection of typing

In this paper, we summarize some of the lessons learned from the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering (AOLME) project. The AOLME project uses an integrated curriculum that relies on the use of basic concepts from middle-school mathematics to teach the foundations of image and video representations. The middle-school students, mostly from underrepresented groups, learn how to program their own video representations using Python libraries running on the Raspberry Pi. Overall, we have found that the students enjoy participating in the project.

High school capstone courses—culminating educational experiences for seniors as they conclude their formal high school education—have become increasingly popular across the nation, particularly in New England. The STEMStarter Capstone was designed to help Connecticut high schools meet new accreditation standards from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) and graduation requirements that include a mastery-based learning project. Standard 2 of the NEASC 2020 Standards (2018) for school accreditation states: “Students are active learners and have the opportunity to lead

Pre-post data from 764 treatment and 553 comparison middle school students from nine US states were analyzed to examine STEM-related attitudes and dispositions aligning with climate change beliefs and intentions, and acquisition of energy and environmental science content knowledge. Findings were that at least seven non-cognitive variables contribute between eight and fifteen percent of the beliefs, intentions, and knowledge acquisitions of interest in this study, in linear combinations of subsets of the variables. Implications of these findings for promoting interest in STEM are discussed