The CISTEME365 project headquartered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hypothesizes that experiences with cutting-edge technology must exist all year-round to effect significant improvement. Thus, the fundamental project goal is to enable middle and high school Underrepresented Students (URSs) in STEM (female, underrepresented minority, and/or low-income) to participate in sustained, intensive, hands-on STEM learning experiences.

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.

This project expands from a single site into a multi-university, multi-school teacher professional development and curriculum development initiative for geospatial integration into science, social studies, and STEM courses. Student outcomes addressed include spatial thinking and reasoning and STEM college and career interests.

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.

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. 

Communities of color across the nation face increasing challenges with affordable access to safe drinking water. Using data science to explore why, where and how this is happening, and what is being done about it, provides a powerful vehicle for the engagement of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and to help develop a digital work force with appropriate representation from the affected communities.

We create and study virtual simulations of peer collaboration in STEM fields, designed for youth in informal learning environments. Practice with the simulations will help teens from underrepresented groups build collaborative skills and career interest in STEM fields, especially those that use mathematics and require strong teamwork.