Billion Oysters Project

News

Billion Oyster Project (BOP) is an effort to restore a sustainable oyster population and to foster awareness, affinity, and understanding of the Harbor by engaging New Yorkers directly in the work of restoring one billion oysters. The hands-on science of reef construction and monitoring is executed through in-school restoration based STEM learning opportunities, community science and research, restaurant shell collection and volunteer programs.

Read More

How Baltimore Is Growing Its Tech Gurus From Scratch

News
Image

The Digital Harbor Foundation, recent recipient of ITEST funding, was featured last month in Politico Magazine's "What Works" series. Digital Harbor, a non-profit maker-space laboratory located in Baltimore, is teaching area youth to learn STEM by doing, and having fun: Researchers who’ve studied Digital Harbor kids recently found that teens who’ve gone through its introductory course show a 10-percent increase in “divergent thinking” – a measure

Read More

National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase I

Opportunities

The National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program provides non-dilutive funds for small businesses to conduct research and development (R&D) on technology innovations that have the potential to be commercially successful and benefit society. The NSF SBIR program accepts innovative proposals that show promise of commercial and societal impact in almost all areas of technology.

Read More

Bringing programming -- and social change -- to girls: 'Co-Robots for CompuGirls' gets students to think about how robots can address human problems

News
Image

Survey after survey has shown a lack of women engaged in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. It's an utterly human problem, but one group of eighth-grade girls recently experimented with a way to address at least one aspect of it -- with robots. The students, participating in a program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Co-Robots for CompuGirls, programmed a pair of two-foot, identical humanoid "Nao

Read More

Next Generation STEM Learning for All: Envisioning Advances Based on NSF Supported Research

Publication
Image
Next Generation STEM Learning for All: Envisioning Advances Based on NSF Supported Research Report Cover

This report presents important takeaways from a one-day National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Forum, “Next Generation STEM Learning for All,” organized by Education Development Center (EDC) and SRI International through the STEM Learning and Research Center (STELAR) at EDC, the Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE) at EDC, and the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), working in close collaboration with NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.The Forum engaged prominent scientists in STEM learning research and school

Read More

New Report Calls STEM Learning a "Social Justice" Issue

News

The new report Next Generation STEM Learning For All: Envisioning Advances Based on NSF Supported Research highlights the ways in which STEM offers traditionally underrepresented groups increased opportunities for individual success, calling access to STEM education an issue of social justice. The report comes out of the forum of the same name, which was organized by EDC and SRI International for the National Science Foundation (NSF).In addition

Read More

Design-based Information Technologies Learning Experience Project for K-12 STEM Outreach

Publication

This paper presents the design of the Design-Based Information Technologies Learning Experiences (DITLE) project, a large K-12 STEM outreach project supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It impacts IT education among six public high schools in a metropolitan area. The designed activities of the project are presented and shared with the education research community to invoke discussion. The project is currently in its first year of a three-year grant period. The lessons and experiences learned so far are also summarized for discussion.

Read More