This project is expanding an effective mobile making program to achieve sustainable, widespread impact among underserved youth. Making is a design-based, participant-driven endeavor that is based on a learning by doing pedagogy. For nearly a decade, California State University San Marcos has operated out-of-school making programs for bringing both equipment and university student facilitators to the sites in under-served communities. In collaboration with four other CSU campuses, this project will expand along four dimensions: (a) adding community sites in addition to school sites (b) adding rural contexts in addition to urban/suburban, (c) adding hybrid and online options in addition to in-person), and (d) including future teachers as facilitators in addition to STEM undergraduates. The program uses design thinking as a framework to engage participants in addressing real-world problems that are personally and socially meaningful. Participants will use low- and high-tech tools, such as circuity, coding, and robotics to engage in activities that respond to design challenges. A diverse group of university students will lead weekly, 90-minute activities and serve as near-peer mentors, providing a connection to the university for the youth participants, many of whom will be first-generation college students. The project will significantly expand the Mobile Making program from 12 sites in North San Diego County to 48 sites across California, with nearly 2,000 university facilitators providing 12 hours of programming each year to over 10,000 underserved youth (grades 4th through 8th) during the five-year timeline.
The project research will examine whether the additional sites and program variations result in positive youth and university student outcomes. For youth in grades 4 through 8, the project will evaluate impacts including sustained interest in making and STEM, increased self-efficacy in making and STEM, and a greater sense that making and STEM are relevant to their lives. For university student facilitators, the project will investigate impacts including broadened technical skills, increased leadership and 21st century skills, and increased lifelong interest in STEM outreach/informal science education. Multiple sources of data will be used to research the expanded Mobile Making program's impact on youth and undergraduate participants, compare implementation sites, and understand the program's efficacy when across different communities with diverse learner populations. A mixed methods approach that leverages extant data (attendance numbers, student artifacts), surveys, focus groups, making session feedback forms, observations, and field notes will together be used to assess youth and university student participant outcomes. The project will disaggregate data based on gender, race/ethnicity, grade level, and site to understand the Mobile Making program's impact on youth participants at multiple levels across contexts. The project will further compare findings from different types of implementation sites (e.g., school vs. library), learner groups, (e.g., middle vs. upper elementary students), and facilitator groups (e.g., STEM majors vs. future teachers). This will enable the project to conduct cross-case comparisons between CSU campuses. Project research will also compare findings from urban and rural school sites as well as based on the modality of teaching and learning (e.g., in-person vs. online). The mobile making program activities, project research, and a toolkit for implementing a Mobile maker program will be widely disseminated to researchers, educators, and out-of-school programs.
Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended targets of such investments learn to develop new maker related educational programs. Using the framework of Expansive Learning, focusing on organizational learning processes resulting in new and unfolding forms of activity, this paper begins to fill
Designing for Diversity will establish a national Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of maker spaces and fab labs serving Black and Latino high school students and specializing in computational making programs. The project will be led by the New York Hall of Science, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a national leadership team representing universities, cultural organizations, corporations, foundations and leaders in the Maker Movement. Using a NIC methodology, the partners will identify the most promising mechanisms for ensuring that participation in computational making programs has a significant impact on participants' choices to pursue STEM focused internships, post-secondary education, and career paths. The project will extend the NIC methodology into the informal learning community, which is in need of research methods that are both rigorous and accommodating of the institutional complexities of building and sustaining high-quality informal learning environments, and it will contribute to the literature on the impact of maker spaces and fab labs in underserved communities on the diversification of the STEM pipeline. The project will also pave the way for the development of a more fully-developed network of computational making programs across the country and a more comprehensive research initiative that will influence best practices in maker spaces and fab labs and foster perceptions of the value and impact of maker experiences on young people's readiness for future educational experiences and careers.
The project builds on research indicating that computational making - programs that combine the making of artifacts with computational tools and techniques - is a powerful strategy for engaging underrepresented students in STEM learning. However, participation in such programs will not necessarily lead students to take concrete steps toward computationally-rich STEM careers in which they are currently under-represented. A range of research suggests that computational making programs need to explicitly design for and address the socio-emotional dimensions of these learning experiences in order for them to become stepping stones into these careers. Designing for Diversity will work with a network of maker programs serving high needs Black and Latino high school students to address these learning factors. During this pilot, the leadership team will accomplish three tasks: (1) establish a common framework, shared measurement objectives and guidelines that will be used to identify, recruit and support participant maker programs and their local partners; (2) develop and coordinate the NIC's capacity for scaling and disseminating its work by connecting the research efforts to broader national initiatives; and (3) recruit, train, and collect baseline data on the Designing for Diversity NIC.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Margaret HoneyKatherine McMillanPaul LeMahieuAndres Henriquez
While the term 'failure' brings to mind negative associations, there is a current focus on failure as a driver of innovation and development in many professional fields. It is also emerging from prior research that for STEM professionals and educators, failure plays an important role in designing and making to increase learning, persistence and other noncognitive skills such as self-efficacy and independence. By investigating how youth and educators attend to moments of failure, how they interpret what this means, and how they respond, we will be better able to understand the dynamics of each part of the experience. The research team will be working with youth from urban, suburban and rural settings, students from Title I schools or who qualify for free/reduced-price lunches, those from racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as students who are learning English as a second language. These youth are from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM and in making, and research indicates they are more likely to experience negative outcomes when they experience failure.
The intellectual merit of this project centers on establishing a baseline understanding of how failure in making is triggered and experienced by youth, what role educators play in the process, and what can be done to increase persistence and learning, rather than failure being an end-state. The research team will investigate these issues through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, the team will design and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on increasing the abilities of youth and educators in noticing and responding to failures and increasing positive (e.g., resilience) outcomes. Research sites are selected because they will allow collection of data on youth from a wide range of backgrounds. The research team will also work to test and revise their hypothesized model of the influence of factors on persistence through failures in making. This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering (ENG).
This paper introduces an ongoing research project on the use of electronics workshops in engaging underprivileged Latino middle and high school students in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The project focuses on the practice of circuit bending – taking apart and creatively manipulating the circuits of children's toys to produce novel sound output. The main goal of the project is to design, develop and test curricula and materials that inspire learning in adolescents. Second hand, discarded or low cost electronics are used in the workshops as a low cost platform for
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Garnet HertzGillian HayesAmelia Guimarin
This pathways project will design, develop and test Do-It-Yourself, (DIY), hands-on workshops to introduce and teach middle school females in underserved Latino communities computing and design by customizing and repurposing e-waste media technology, such as old cell phones or appliances -- items found in the students homes or neighborhoods. The major outcome of the project will be the creation of a workshop kit that covers the processes of DIY electronics learning taking place in the workshops for distribution of the curriculum to after school programs and other informal science venues. The PIs have implemented three pilot projects over the last three years that demonstrate the ability of hands-on DIY electronics curricula to motivate and encourage students and to enable them to acquire a deeper understanding of core engineering, mathematics and science concepts. This project would extend the approach to underserved Latino youth, particular girls of middle school age. This audience was identified because of the historically low rate of participation in STEM fields by people in this group and the particular challenges that females have in acquiring knowledge in technical STEM areas. The proposal suggests that the approach of using hands-on workshops that rely on low technical requirements -- essentially obsolete or discarded electronic equipment, primarily from homes of participants -- will encourage the target audience to experiment with items they are familiar with and that are culturally relevant. The hypothesis of the project is that this approach will lower barriers to experimenting with "circuit bending" - the hand-modifying of battery-powered children's toys to build custom electronic instruments and lead to greater participation and success of females in the target group. The project will provide free workshops in two neighborhood locations and be supported by undergraduate student mentors and volunteers and staff of two community groups that are part of the project, Machine Project and Girls, Inc. Participants will demonstrate the finished projects to the workshop group, mentors and parents. Each participant will receive a copy of the workshop handbook in both English and Spanish to take home so that parents, members of the community and caregivers can supervise and participate in future projects.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Garnet HertzGillian HayesRebecca Black