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.
Digital Storytelling with children in urban emergent communities, this project aims to create protocols that children can use to document, share, and showcase the rich mathematical knowledge that exists in their own families and communities.
This project is a multiyear study of the impact of an enrichment program that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) managed in the 1990s. The Young Scholars Program (YSP) involved around 18,000 7th–12th grade students and 600 separate grants between 1989 and 1996. The purpose of YSP was to introduce high-achieving middle and secondary school students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to encourage their entry into those fields and thus increase the size and quality of the nation’s STEM workforce.
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.
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.
Data Jam engages students in the process of exploring, analyzing, and summarizing long-term data about nearby ecosystems that are the subject of extensive long-term study by LTER.
The YouthAstroNet project is scaling up a program & online learning platform for youth ages 11-14 that features customized access to robotic telescopes, support for learner-driven engagement with scientific and computational analysis tools and practices, and interactions with digital STEM mentors.
The goal for the STEM Career Connections project is to develop an innovative career readiness model for both in and out of school settings that will profoundly increase the knowledge of, and interest in, STEM and computing careers for middle school youth in a rural mountain community who are often underserved in STEM fields.