What's New

GUTS y Girls is a three-year ITEST project designed to attract New Mexico girls to careers in STEM -- fields in which women are historically under-represented. Once-a-month Saturday workshops in Santa Fe will offer girls the opportunity to meet women scientists and professionals, participate in hands-on projects, and learn about career options. Two-week summer workshops are being held in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces.

ITEST project GUTS y Girls, in partnership with Arizona State University professor Dan Hruschka, has developed a new curriculum to engage students in understanding how computing and complex adaptive systems play an essential role in the social sciences. Geared towards the high school level, the curriculum has students explore questions and test their own assumptions using methods and data from the social sciences and computer modeling in NetLogo

Twenty ITEEA teachers will be selected through a competitive application process to participate in pilot-testing the hybrid professional development institute developed by the Stevens Institute of Technology and ITEEA as part of the ITEST project BUILD IT Scale Up. Selected teachers will attend a full-day face-to-face workshop and complete several online modules. They will then implement the curriculum and provide feedback about the training and

A multidisciplinary team from the UW Colleges of Education, Engineering, and Arts and Sciences to research whether gaming and robotics can be used to teach computational thinking skills to middle school students in culturally sensitive ways through ITEST project Visualization Basics. Visualization Basics team members will train teachers to develop mathematical and scientific lessons that are culturally relevant to their students, support

ITEST project WNY Genetics in Research Partnership has secured funding to enable teachers and high school students from 13 counties in Western and Central New York to conduct scientific research in bioinformatics during the next three years. Grant money will be used to educate teachers and encourage students to pursue careers in engineering and the sciences.

This article in Scientific American features the ITEST project Predicting STEM Career Choice from Computational Indicators of Student Engagement within Middle School Mathematics Classes. The article details efforts to bring more rigorous science to classrooms and research that is showing that our intuitions about education may be wrong.

In Oakland, California, a team of teachers, professional men and women, and educators from the Chabot Space and Science Center are actively engaged in encouraging girls and young women in math, science, and technology. The Techbridge program provides hands-on opportunities for girls in elementary school through high school to explore these key areas and for teachers to participate in subject-specific professional-development opportunities.