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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Garnet HertzGillian HayesRebecca Black
The National Science Festival Network project, also operating as the Science Festival Alliance, is designed to create a sustainable national network of science festivals that engages all facets of the general public in science learning. Science Festivals, clearly distinct from "science fairs", are community-wide activities engaging professional scientists and informal and K-12 educators targeting underrepresented segments of local communities historically underserved by formal or informal STEM educational activities. The initiative builds on previous work in other parts of the world (e.g. Europe, Australasia) and on recent efforts in the U.S. to create science festivals. The target audiences are families, children and youth ages 5-18, adults, professional scientists and educators in K-12 and informal science institutions, and underserved and underrepresented communities. Project partners include the MIT Museum in Cambridge, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The deliverables include annual science festivals in these four cities supported by year-round related activities for K-12 and informal audiences, a partnership network, a web portal, and two national conferences. Ten science festivals will be convened in total over the 3 years of the project, each reaching 15,000 to 60,000 participants per year. STEM content includes earth and space science, oceanography, biological/biomedical science, bioinformatics, and computer, behavioral, aeronautical, nanotechnology, environmental, and nuclear science. An independent evaluator will systematically assess audience participation and perceptions, level/types of science interest stimulated in target groups, growth of partnering support at individual sites, and increasing interactions between ISE and formal K-12 education. A variety of qualitative and quantitative assessments will be designed and utilized. The project has the potential to transform public communication and understanding of science and increase the numbers of youth interested in pursuing science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Loren ThompsonJeremy BabendureBen Wiehe
Investigators from the MIT Media Lab will develop and study a new generation of the Scratch programming platform, designed to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- essential skills for success in the 21st century. With Scratch, young people (ages 8 and up) can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, then share their creations with others online. Young people around the world have already shared more than 1 million projects on the Scratch community website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The new generation, called Scratch 2.0, will be fully integrated into the Internet, so that young people can more seamlessly share and collaborate on projects, access online data, and program interactions with social media. The research is divided into two strands: (1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications. (2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration. This work builds on a previous NSF grant (ITR-0325828) that supported the development of Scratch. Since its public launch in 2007, Scratch has become a vibrant online community, in which young people program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations - and, in the process, learn important computational concepts and strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating. Each day, members of the Scratch community upload nearly 1500 new Scratch projects to the website - on average, a new project almost every minute. In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation: (1) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity? (2) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity? Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won?t just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity. Broader Impacts: The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a ?promising practice? for increasing gender diversity in IT.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mitchel ResnickNatalie RuskJohn Maloney
For the purpose of clarity and consistency, the term e-learning is used throughout the paper to refer to technology-enhanced learning and information technology (IT) in teaching and learning. IT depicts computing and other IT resources. Research into e-learning has changed in focus and breadth over the last four decades as a consequence of changing technologies, and changes in educational policies and practices. Although increasing numbers of young people have access to a wide range of IT technologies during their leisure activities, little is known about this impact on their learning. Much of
This project supports the development of technological fluency and understanding of STEM concepts through the implementation of design collaboratives that use eCrafting Collabs as the medium within which to work with middle and high school students, parents and the community. The researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute combine expertise in learning sciences, digital media design, computer science and informal science education to examine how youth at ages 10-16 and families in schools, clubs, museums and community groups learn together how to create e-textile artifacts that incorporate embedded computers, sensors and actuators. The project investigates the feasibility of implementing these collaboratives using eCrafting via three models of participation, individual, structured group and cross-generational community groups. They are designing a portal through which the collaborative can engage in critique and sharing of their designs as part of their efforts to build a model process by which scientific and engineered product design and analysis can be made available to multiple audiences. The project engages participants through middle and high school elective classes and through the workshops conducted by a number of different organizations including the Franklin Institute, Techgirlz, the Hacktory and schools in Philadelphia. Participants can engage in the eCrafting Collabs through individual, collective and community design challenges that are established by the project. Participants learn about e-textile design and about circuitry and programming using either ModKit or the text-based Arduino. The designs are shared through the eCrafting Collab portal and participants are required to provide feedback and critique. Researchers are collecting data on learner identity in relation to STEM and computing, individual and collective participation in design and student understanding of circuitry and programming. The project is an example of a scalable intervention to engage students, families and communities in developing technological flexibility. This research and development project provides a resource that engages students in middle and high schools in technology rich collaborative environments that are alternatives to other sorts of science fairs and robotic competitions. The resources developed during the project will inform how such an informal/formal blend of student engagement might be scaled to expand the experiences of populations of underserved groups, including girls. The study is conducting an examination of the new types of learning activities that are multiplying across the country with a special focus on cross-generational learning.
Fields and Enyedy studied how two students who learned computer programming in an OST program leveraged their skills in the classroom to broker positions as experts in the classroom community. Expert identity is reinforced by the interactions among what students do, how they see themselves, and how others see them.
NOVA Labs (pbs.org/nova/labs) is a free digital platform that engages teens and lifelong learners in activities and games that foster authentic scientific exploration. From building RNA molecules and designing renewable energy systems to tracking cloud movements and learning cybersecurity strategies, NOVA Labs participants can take part in real-world investigations by visualizing, analyzing, and playing with the same data that scientists use. Each Lab focuses on a different area of active research. But all of them illustrate key concepts with engaging and informative videos, and guide participants as they answer scientific questions or design solutions to current problems. Supporting pages on each Lab site explain the purpose and functions of the Lab, help teachers incorporate it into their classrooms, foster collaboration between users, and help users make connections to the broader world of STEM. Users are encouraged to explore potential career paths through “Meet the Scientists” profiles, and to obtain information about local and national STEM resources.
Informal Community Science Investigators (iCSI) creates a network of four geographically diverse informal science institutions working together on strategies to engage youth ages 10-13 through location based augmented reality (AR) games played on smartphones. These high-interest, kid-friendly games will be used by families visiting the institutions and by youth who enroll in more intensive summer camp programs. Using AR games, participants will engage in playful but scientifically-grounded investigations drawing on each institution's research, exhibits, and natural spaces. For example, a botanical garden might engage young visitors through AR games with themes related to native and invasive species, while a zoo might create a game experience focusing on illegal wildlife trade. Participants in the iCSI summer camp program will have more intensive experiences, including work with the host institution's scientists, opportunities to develop original augmented reality games, and experiences with game-related service learning and citizen science programs. For both target groups (families and campers), the location specific games build understanding of both the institution's mission and the broader realm of scientific research and application. The project will test the notion of participants as "learner hero," the link between game play and the individual's development of competency, autonomy and the relationship to real world experience, in this case through community action on the subject of the game developed. To that end, participants will be encouraged to extend their involvement through related investigations on site and participation in community activities and projects that can be done at home. Social media tools such as Facebook and web sites managed by the host institutions will provide recognition for this extended engagement, helping participants maintain ties to the program. Additionally, program resources provide assistance to adult family members in nurturing and sustaining youth interest in STEM activities and careers. A major effort of the project will be development of a new software infrastructure called TaleBlazer for the augmented reality game that will enable teachers and students to develop their own game that incorporates real data collection and scientific model building. The new platform will enhance the game play platform MITAR developed with NSF funding.
Digital media and technology are revolutionizing how, where and when children learn, compelling many educators to completely re-imagine what a learning experience looks like. At the core of effective digital media and learning is the principle that instructional strategies should be personalized and that technology is a tool that supports effective teaching and learning practices. Afterschool programs are an ideal setting for digital learning--excelling at providing interest-driven learning opportunities can learn at their own pace, participate in hands-on learning experiences, and engage in
The number of jobs requiring proficiency in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields is projected to grow by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018, which is almost double the growth of non-STEM occupations. Computing and engineering represent a majority of these STEM jobs, and it is important that students are prepared to take advantage of these opportunities. Afterschool programs represent an avenue to provide robust learning experiences in computing and engineering, especially as schools are under many constraints and pressures that might prevent them from offering these topics
Discovering and understanding the temporal evolution of events hidden in text corpora is a complex yet critical task for knowledge discovery. Although mining event dynamics has been an important research topic leading to many successful algorithms, researchers, research and development managers, intelligence analysts and the general public are still in dire need of effective tools to explore the evolutionary trends and patterns. This exploratory project focuses on developing and validating a novel idea called narrative animation. Narrative animation uses animated visualizations to narrate, explore, and share event dynamics conveyed in temporally evolving text collections. Film art techniques are employed to leverage the animated visualizations in information organization and change detection, with the goals of enhancing analytical power and user engagement. A prototype system called CityStories is being developed to generate narrative animations of events in cities derived from web-based text. If this novel, risky research is successful, it is expected to yield fundamental results in narrative animation that can advance the current paradigm in information visualization and visual analytics by developing novel techniques in using animations for presenting and analyzing dynamic abstract data at a large scale. The pilot system CityStories system is expected provide a novel network platform for education, entertainment, and data analytics. It will engage general users such as students, teachers, journalists, bloggers, and many others in web information visualization and study. Results of this research will be disseminated through publications, the World Wide Web, and collaborations with researchers and analysts. The project web site (http://coitweb.uncc.edu/~jyang13/narrativeanimation/narrativeanimation.htm) will include research outcomes, publications, developed software, videos, and datasets for wide dissemination to public.