This collaborative project aims to establish STEM career identity among Latinx youth and help them identify the academic pathways needed to best position themselves for the future workplace. The project team leverages previously developed curriculum in the context of a network science lens and designs an evidence-based personalized career development curriculum.
This poster describes our NSF ITEST Project on culturally responsive STEM education and the power of students' stories about STEM in their homes and communities to not only engage students more deeply in their STEM learning, but also to help students, eductors and parents expand their understandings of where STEM can be found in the world and valued knowledge that exists in all communities.
Relatively little research exists on the use of experiences with physiological sensors to support STEM education. In this work, we draw on techniques from physiological computing and computer science education to explore novel ways to build students' computational thinking skills.
The increasing sophistication and availability of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies wield the potential to transform how we teach and learn computational concepts and coding. This project develops a platform for creative coding in virtual and augmented reality. The Embodied Coding Environment (ECE) is a node-based system developed in the Unity game engine. It is conceptualized as a merged digital/physical workspace where spatial representations of code, the visual outputs of the code, and user editing histories are co-located in a virtual 3D space.
The connections with music present a great opportunity for engaging children in the science of sound, and science in general. With this goal, our program has been creating a series of web applications and hands-on activities that allow children to explore, visualize, and play with sound. Our previous work, carried out in the classroom with heavy involvement of our team, showed that the approach was effective for increasing children’s engagement with science.
The future workforce is being drastically reshaped by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The advancement in AI theories, algorithms and practices has not only created great demands for AI scientists, engineers, technicians and entrepreneurs but also reformulated the nature of work in almost all industries. Importantly today's students must gain a fundamental understanding of AI in order to be prepared to enter the workforce of the future.
Healthcare is becoming robotics reliant. Hands-on learning of assistive and rehabilitation robotics in meaningful contexts such as improving quality of life will broaden the participation of underrepresented students including females and ethnic minorities.
QuEST develops and researches practices in precollege quantum science and computing instruction that are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. The goals include the development of (1) quantum knowledge and quantum computing practices that promote critical thinking, reasoning, and communication skills; and (2) student awareness and interest in quantum computing careers and academic pathways.
The project's central goals are threefold: (1) to provide access to meaningful bilingual computer programming and mathematics (CPM) experiences to Latinx middle school students, (2) to develop a bilingual CPM curriculum based on Python and Jupyter Notebook to provide visual representations of mathematics concepts, and 3) to prepare and work with teachers through interdisciplinary teams and action research to integrate CPM into the school curriculum.