The University of Nebraska partners with the National Center for Research on Rural Education, The Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education (UNL), and Nebraska's 18 Educational Service Units (ESU 1-ESU 18) to utilize distance education and communication technologies to provide university outreach opportunities to students and teachers through science research to high schools in Nebraska.
This Learning and Research Center will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by providing technical support to all ITEST projects, facilitating national dissemination of ITEST project outcomes, and further developing the ITEST research and development community.
Robotics and GPS/GIS in 4-H: Workforce Skills for the 21st Century is a-five year scale-up project to use 4-H clubs to prepare middle school youth for the STEM workplace. The project builds on and extends an existing research-based ITEST project by developing and testing new national curricula to introduce basic technology skills, foster problem solving and inquiry skills, and encourage teamwork.
This project will enable high school and middle school STEM teachers and students to conduct environmental research aided by the analysis of images from digital cameras, scanners, and the Internet. The project explores how digital image analysis can be applied to environmental quality issues that can readily be introduced into STEM courses, engaging students and encouraging them to think about related careers. The project will develop research agendas that will employ a variety of image analysis tools.
The Barcode of Life Initiative (BOLI) is an international biodiversity collaboration that creates a genetic encyclopedia of Earth's plants and animals using short DNA sequences that uniquely identify species groups. The goal of this strategies project is to interest students in STEM careers by engaging them in an international project to provide identification of biological species.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in partnership with Nebraska 4-H, is building upon an existing collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie's Robotics Curriculum program to produce an innovative program focusing on Robotics, Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as applied to the domain of precision agriculture and environmental science. The program aims to improve STEM learning outcomes, attitudes towards science and career path development of rural youth ages 12-15.
The "Silicon Prairie Initiative for Robotics in IT" (SPIRIT), a collaboration between the University of Nebraska and the Omaha Public Schools, is a three-year Comprehensive ITEST Project for Students and Teachers. SPIRIT targets 105 science and mathematics teachers in grades 7-8, each of whom receives more than 100 hours of summer professional development and 50 hours of follow-up support in developing in-school curricular activities related to educational robotics. More than 9,000 students are expected to participate through in-school and summer programs.
National Middle School Aerospace Scholars (NaMAS) will provide both teachers and students in eight states the opportunity to learn about and experience information technologies and how they are used within the context of STEM applications in the exciting high technology aerospace industry. NaMAS will include teacher-training workshops, live-link events from NASA-Johnson Space Center, and a robot building student event.