Resources included in these libraries were submitted by ITEST projects or STELAR and are relevant to the work of the NSF ITEST Program. PDFs and/or URLs to the original resource are included in the resource description whenever possible. In some cases, full text publications are located behind publishers’ paywalls and a fee or membership to the third party site may be required for access. Permission for use must be requested through the publisher or author listed in each entry.
Real-World Inspired Classrooms
Curricular MaterialsThis is a site for teachers to share and browse lesson ideas that will bring relevance and applicability into the classroom. The ideas and lessons on this site are the product of teacher-externs of the Real World Externships program, often based on their summer experience working in local businesses and industries.
RoboExpo
VideoHundreds of students go to Balboa Park for the annual RoboExpo. The expo included thirty exhibits, and 700 kids registered for the event. Many of the expos involve robots that can do different tasks.
Seaperch
VideoIn Chula Vista, about 100 middle school students used seaperches - remote-controlled waterproof submersibles - to study sharks at the Living Coast Discovery Center. The seaperches are equipped with cameras to get an up-close look at sea life. The event was part of the SDSU STEM initiative to give
Checklists for the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development
PublicationThis document includes six checklists created by the Evaluation Resource Center for Advanced Technological Education (EvaluATE). These checklists may be used by researchers and evaluators to check for adherence to the National Science Foundation's Common Guidelines.
Why is Cyberlearning Important?
VideoThis video by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) at SRI shares responses to the question of "Why is cyberlearning important?" from those working in the field.
What is Cyberlearning? Explaining cyberlearning to unfamiliar audiences
PublicationThis document created by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) provides background information on cyberlearning, answering what, why, and how.
Learning Sciences
PublicationThis document created by the Center for Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) synthesizes the field of learning sciences and how it intersects with cyberlearning.
Making Educational Games That Work in The Classroom
PublicationThe development of analytical skills is a central goal of the Next Generation Science Standards and foundational to subject mastery in STEM fields. Yet, significant barriers exist to students gaining such skills. Here we describe a new “gentleslope” cyberlearning strategy that gradually introduces students to the authoring of scientific simulations via a Web-based modding approach called CyberMOD. Modding involves adding agents with predefined functionality to a simulation world to produce a unique combination whose behavior can then be visualized by running the simulation. This permits low
Conversational Programming: Exploring Interactive Program Analysis
PublicationOur powerful computers help very little in debugging the program we have so we can change it into the program we want. We introduce Conversational Programming as a way to harness our computing power to inspect program meaning through a combination of partial program execution and semantic program annotation. A programmer in our approach interactively selects highly autonomous “agents” in a program world as conversation topics and then changes the world to explore the potential behaviors of a selected agent in different scenarios. In this way, the programmer proactively knows how their code