This Smart and Connected Community (SCC) project will partner with two rural communities to develop STEMports, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning game for workforce development. The game's activities will take players on localized Augmented Reality (AR) missions to both engage in STEM learning challenges and discover emerging STEM careers in their community, specifically highlighting innovations in the fields of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, forest products, and renewable energy. Community Advisory Teams (CATs) and co-design teams, including youth, representatives from the targeted emerging STEM economies, and decision-makers will partner with project staff to co-design STEMports that reflect the interests, cultural contexts, and envisioned STEM industries of the future for each community.
The project will: (a) design and pilot an AR game for community STEM workforce development; (b) develop and adapt a community engagement process that optimizes community networking for co-designing the gaming application and online community; and (c) advance a scalable process for wider applications of STEMports. This project is a collaboration between the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and the Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to both build and research the co-designing of a SCC based within an AR environment. The project will contribute knowledge to the informal STEM learning, community development, and education technology fields in four major ways:
Deepening the understanding of how innovative technological tools support rural community STEM knowledge building as well as STEM identity and workforce interest.
Identifying design principles for co-designing the STEMports community related to the technological design process.
Developing social network approaches and analytics to better understand the social dimensions and community connections fostered by the STEMport community.
Understanding how participants' online and offline interactions with individuals and experiences builds networks and knowledge within a SCC.
With the scaling of use by an ever-growing community of players, STEMports will provide a new AR-based genre of public participation in STEM and collective decision making. The research findings will add to the emerging literature on community-wide education, innovative education technologies, informal STEM learning (especially place-based learning and STEM ecosystems), and participatory design research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
The concept of connected learning proposes that youth leverage individual interest and social media to drive learning with an academic focus. To illustrate, we present in-depth case studies of Ryan and Sam, two middle-school-age youth, to document an out-of-school intervention intended to direct toward intentional learning in STEM that taps interest and motivation. The investigation focused on how Ryan and Sam interacted with the designed elements of Studio STEM and whether they became more engaged to gain deeper learning about science concepts related to energy sustainability. The
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This project will develop and study a cyber-enhanced informal learning environment to improve observational practices and classification skills among citizen scientists. The project will focus on the taxonomic identification skills needed by volunteers to provide high-quality data for water quality monitoring of local streams, lakes, estuaries, wetlands, and ground water resources. To make the task of identifying freshwater insects easier and more engaging, the project will develop an innovative educational resource, the Macroinvertebrate Identification Training Environment, that will use zoomable high-resolution images, interactive media, and annotations of diagnostic features to improve perceptual skills. The goal is to increase the confidence and accuracy of volunteers engaged in identification tasks, while also increasing the reliability and quality of the data they are generating for purposes of scientific research and conservation efforts. This interdisciplinary design research and development project will use networked gigapixel image technology to create a visual environment where users can move seamlessly from full panoramic views of macroinvertebrates to extreme close-ups, with embedded text, images, graphics, audio, and video at various locations and zoom levels. This system will be developed in concert with a cognitive apprenticeship training model designed through a series of design studies. The design studies will be conducted over a two-year period and will include examination of the distinguishing features of various biomonitoring programs, reviews of existing training materials and strategies, expert performance analysis of professional entomologists, and development of user interface features. Project developers will collaborate with five regional volunteer biomonitoring organizations to engage a diverse set of volunteers in the design process, including rural populations, older adults, urban youth, and the trainers who support them. The project work will consist of four integrated strands of activity: design-based learning research, creation of an entomological teaching collection, cyberplatform development, and the external evaluation of the training system. The resulting Macroinvertebrate Identification Training Environment will be evaluated in terms of its impacts on volunteer accuracy, confidence, and engagement in taxonomic classification activities related to macroinvertebrates. The impacts of the learning system on trainers and volunteer biomonitoring organizations will also be examined.