Take Flight is a free adaptable school curriculum program developed by Learning Scientists at CAST, the organization that founded Universal Design for Learning (UDL), funded by the National Science Foundation.
Through Take Flight, teachers middle school teacher have access to the curriculum, tools and resources they need to integrate drones into their STEM curriculum to help their students develop STEM skills and increase their motivation to pursue STEM careers.
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.
The goal of this project is to develop an innovative, research-based workforce development model for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder that (1) increases student self-regulation, interest, and motivation in Geographic Information Science & Technology (GIST), (2) expands students’ understanding of GIST/STEM concepts and skill sets, and (3) certifies students as FAA Drone Pilots (FAA Part 107).
This ITEST-Alabama (Developing and Testing Innovations: DTI) project aims to advance efforts to better understand and promote practices that increase minority high school students' motivations and capacities to pursue STEM careers. This project engages students in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences in fields of computing, specifically in cybersecurity.
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.
Project Overview: This two-year research-design project, undertaken in collaboration with GBH and Molly of Denali is: (1) building new knowledge about the ways in which children from rural Alaska Native communities, ages 6- 8, develop “environmental identity” (defined as the empathy, knowledge, and skills that children need to act responsibly for the environment) and (2) investigating how environmental identity can be nurtured via an intergenerational, community-based environmental science program that is supported by appropriate technologies and
The development of spatial orientation (SO) is a strong predictor of math skills and later school success and academic achievement. Thus, fostering SO skills before children enter formal schooling provides them with a sound foundation for later mathematical learning. Our project is titled Transforming Preschoolers' Spatial Orientation: Leveraging New Technologies for Learning in Early Childhood Classrooms and at Home.
Media producers from GBH and researchers from South Dakota State University and the University of Alaska Southeast have recently launched a new research and development project that is designed to: (1) build new knowledge about the ways in which children from rural Alaska Native communities, ages 6-8, develop “environmental identity”—the empathy, knowledge, and skills that children need to act responsibly for the environment (Green, Kalvaitis, & Worster, 2016)—and (2) investigate how environmental identity can be nurtured via a
The My STEM Story project aims to enhance the identity-based motivation of diverse high school students through their engagement with and reflection on the authentic digital stories of diverse near-peer mentors paving their way in a post-secondary STEM pathway.