This video produced by Live Science captures the impact and excitement of the Build IT Underwater Robotics Competition on June 3rd, 2009. Robots were designed, built, and run by middle school and high school students. This event hosted by the Stevens Institute of Technology, well known for its ocean-engineering programs.
This paper aims to share EDC’s learnings from developing and implementing this method including addressing issues of trust between youth and adult team members, appropriately acknowledging youth contributions, balancing the roles of mentors and adult design partners, and making dynamic curriculum adjustments based on participants learning styles and skill levels.
Insights from the COMPUGIRLS project have provided significant evidence that lack of motivation is a misrepresentation of our girls’ lived experience.
An ongoing and at times seemingly intractable issue in science education and STEM fields is the underperformance and underrepresentation of marginalized youth. This is often attributed to disconnect between school in general, school science specifically and the cultures that youth enact and experience in their daily lives. Although research demonstrates that youth become engaged in STEM when it is relevant to their well-being and that of their community, the question of what motivates underrepresented youth to pursue STEM interests is still not fully understood. This white paper argues for
24 middle school students and 11 teachers from across eastern Montana participated in the ITEST Paleo Exploration Project, which linked the group with scientists in the field (literally). Participants discovered that while digging for dinosaurs can be exciting, it's not as easy as the popular movie makes it seem, and sometimes a lot of patience is required to unearth even a single bone.
Developed by the RI-ITEST project, this pamphlet gets students excited and informed about the varied potential careers that utilize computer modeling. It can be used to help students make connections between their classroom experiences, what they are learning in science, and their future. Links to associated lesson plans and two different versions of the pamphlet are available on the website.This pamphlet and its associated lesson plans were used as part of professional development requirements for teachers throughought Rhode Island who participated in the RI-ITEST project.Suggestions for
EDC, in partnership with the National Girls Collaborative Project and MPR Associates, Inc., convened a 3-day meeting comprised of NSF-funded ITEST grantees, researchers in STEM workforce development and informal learning, STEM industry leaders, and philanthropic organizations.
As part of the Detroit Grand Prix Free Day, on Friday Aug. 29, from 9:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. on Belle Isle in Detroit, approximately a dozen Bosch volunteers are planning a fun and informational day of events for students enrolled in the Detroit-Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP) ITEST project. Volunteers will lend their technology and science expertise to engage students in building and racing motorized toy cars and provide
The National Science Foundation recently gave Tirupalavanam Ganesh, assistant dean for information systems at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, a $1 million grant to pilot the ITEST Learning through Engineering Design and Practice project at two junior high schools in the Mesa Unified School District. Ganesh and his team hope the students will get hooked on technology by using it in innovative and socially relevant ways, he said. Their
The study reported here investigated the use of educational robotics, paired with GPS and GIS geospatial technologies, as a context for learning selected concepts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics within a 4-H camp setting. The study involved 38 students between the ages of 11 to 15. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used in the study, with a 29-question multiple-choice instrument targeting various academic topics. The results of the study suggest that the 4-H robotics and geospatial summer camp program is a promising approach for supporting STEM-related