The University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area will implement “Making Across Montana” —a project to engage K–12 students and teachers in rural and tribal communities with making and tinkering. In collaboration with K–12 education partners in the rural Bitterroot Valley and on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the museum will develop a mobile making and tinkering exhibition and education program. The exhibition will be able to travel to K–12 schools statewide. The project team will develop a K–12 teacher professional development workshop, along with accompanying curriculum resources and supplies. The traveling program and related materials will build schools’ capacity to incorporate making and tinkering—and informal STEM experiences more broadly—into their teaching.
Imagination Station, Toledo’s Science Center, will implement Toledo Tinkers: Through a Child’s Eyes — a new initiative to address barriers to STEM education and promote a lifelong love of those subjects. An outreach curriculum and a mobile tinkering lab will help children ages 11–13 and their families establish personal connections with making and tinkering. Pilot programs will include the Maker Club — a 12-session out-of-school program for students from Boys and Girls Clubs of Toledo and other community-based organizations — as well as Tinkering Takeovers, which is a drop-in tinkering program for families at branch libraries. A community exhibition will showcase the diversity of the Toledo community and its rich history of making and tinkering, using the work of participating children.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being.
Making experiences and activities are rich with opportunities for mathematical reasoning that often go unrecognized by both participants and educators. Since 2015, we have been exploring this potential through the Math in the Making initiative. The work focuses particularly on children’s museums and science centers, many of which have developed maker spaces and programs over the last decade. In this article, we share insights from our most recent round of research. To begin, we consider the fundamental question of what it means to authentically integrate mathematics with making.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Makerspaces and making-related programs are often inaccessible, unaffordable, or simply not available to underserved youth. This three-year, Innovations in Development project involves partnership with four Recreation Centers (two each in Baltimore and Pittsburgh) to (1) train educators in equity-oriented approaches to making, (2) create four learning hubs, (3) develop and test equity-based curricula in each space, and (4) establish a replicable Localization Toolkit for future implementation in other communities.
For many youth, gaining access to quality STEM (science, technology, engineering mathematics) experiences is a challenge. Inequity and underrepresentation of youth of color in STEM persist. The makerspace movement holds great promise in broadening participation in STEM among youth from underrepresented communities. Makerspaces are defined as collaborative workspaces inside a library, school, or other community location designed for creating, learning, exploring, and sharing with high- to low-tech tools. Despite the availability of making programs focused on STEM activities targeted towards youth of color, the field has few models for designing these programs in ways that build upon youths’ cultural assets and desires for making. Working collaboratively with youth, families, and maker educators in Lansing, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina, this project aims to deepen the field’s understanding about the rich and deep ingenuity in STEM-based making that youth from underrepresented communities can engage. These insights will be leveraged towards advancing community-based maker programming across four community-based makerspaces. The project will also build capacity among STEM-oriented maker educators, researchers, and youth. This model is important because the voices and perspectives of families and communities have been largely absent from the formative knowledge and theory-building processes of the field of makerspace education.
This project will build new knowledge about how and why youth and families make at home, in communities, and in STEM-based maker programs. Collaborators for the project include the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and four STEM- and youth-oriented making spaces in Lansing, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina. This project will take place in two phases, exploring two main research questions: 1) What are the learning results of making at home and in the community? And 2) How do youth organize community resources for sustained STEM making, and what facilitates or hinders such organization? Phase one investigates the community resources (people, tools, materials, knowledge, data, and spaces) youth leverage towards making and how they do so across time. The project will study how youth connect these resources to STEM-rich making and what youth and families learn in the process. In phase two, design-based research will be used to apply phase one insights to the design of community-based STEM-rich maker programs in four maker clubs in Michigan and North Carolina. This work will develop an understanding of youths’ family and community-based STEM-based making practices, including the community resources (people, tools, materials, knowledge, data, and spaces) that youth leverage.
This Research in Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
Black Girls Create (BGC) is a program that uses maker pedagogy, social history (i.e., Black women’s contributions in STEM), culturally responsive pedagogy, and mentoring to engage Black girls in STEM. For the project, culturally responsive making is operationally defined as the use of cultural knowledge and maker technologies to create, design, and produce artifacts that are related to a particular concept, theme, or person. The project will conduct a feasibility research study that investigates how engagement in BGC affects participants' STEM interest, STEM confidence, and racial and gender identities. In the project, participants will discover how Black women have made an impact in STEM fields and will learn how to digitally create cultural artifacts/wearable art related to their discoveries. Approximately 120 middle school girls in grades 6-8 (8 groups of 15 participants each) from underserved neighborhoods will be recruited for participation in this two-year study. Each group will meet for 3 hours per week over an 8-week period. Instructional materials from this research will be made freely available online so that they can be adapted and used at other formal and informal educational institutions that seek to garner interest and access to STEM learning for Black girls and women.
A pre- and post-test, quasi-experimental design will be used to research the program’s influence on participants’ self-efficacy, racial identity, and gender identity. Lagged regression models that control for students’ age, race/ethnicity, and pre-survey scores will be used to examine growth in each of the four outcomes. Once all of the participants in the groups have completed BGC, data from all groups will be combined to increase power and thereby detect statistically meaningful differences in pre- and post-survey scores. In addition, variables representing attendance and program engagement will be entered into the model to examine whether students who are highly engaged in BGC programming exhibit more growth in the four outcomes. Qualitative data will be derived from students' journal entries as well as focus group interviews. Weekly journals will be used to gather data about the context and experiences of participants as they unfold throughout the program. Semi-structured focus groups will center around the usefulness of skills and knowledge gained from the program activities, significant experiences with peers and program staff, the opportunity to learn about Black women STEM progenitors, and learning how to make digitally fabricated artifacts. NVIVO, a computer software program, will be used as a tool to support the analysis of the rich, text-based information resulting from the journals and focus group narratives.
This feasibilty research project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
Using a design-based research approach, we studied ways to advance opportunities for children and families to engage in engineering design practices in an informal educational setting. 213 families with 5–11-year-old children were observed as they visited a tinkering exhibit at a children’s museum during one of three iterations of a program posing an engineering design challenge. Children’s narrative reflections about their experience were recorded immediately after tinkering. Across iterations of the program, changes to the exhibit design and facilitation provided by museum staff corresponded
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Maria MarcusDiana AcostaPirko TouguDavid UttalCatherine Haden
A makerspace is a place where participants explore their own interests and learn by creating, tinkering, and inventing artifacts through the use of a rich variety of tools and materials. This project will develop and research a flexible model for makerspaces that can be adapted to local settings to support informal STEM learning for hospitalized, chronically ill patients in pediatric environments who are predominantly youth of color from low-income backgrounds. These youth are subject to health disparities and healthcare inequities. Their frequent absence from school and other activities disrupt friendship formations, reduce their opportunities for social support, reduce their access to environments where they can feel a sense of self-agency through learning and creative activities. Through patient centered co-design, this project will build adaptable STEM makerspace environments conducive to STEM-rich learning, the exercise of self-agency, and development of STEM identity. Project design will focus on the sensitive nature of working with vulnerable populations (i.e., immunocompromised patients). The project will develop and disseminate several resources: (1) a flexible makerspace model that can be adapted to work in different pediatric settings; (2) research methods for conducting research in highly sensitive environments with and alongside young patients; and (3) professional development resources and a playbook including guidebook and facilitators guide that will articulate principles and processes for designing, implementing and sustaining makerspaces in pediatric settings. These resources will be widely disseminated through maker and other informal STEM networks.
The project will pursue two innovations. First, the project will develop the physical design of adaptable informal STEM makerspaces in pediatric settings. Second, the project will develop innovative patient-centered methodologies for studying approaches to physical design and the effects of makerspace installations for informal STEM-learning, self-agency, and STEM identity development. Using a design-based research approach, the project will investigate: (1) the extent to which physical makerspace designs support access to material, relational, and ideational resources for STEM-learning and well-being; (2) the extent to which makerspace installations, researchers, and medical care staff support patients in accessing and generating tools and other resources for personal learning and a sense of agency; and (3) the extent to which makerspace design with a focus on affording material, relational, and ideational resources provide rich opportunities for young patients to explore their own interests and cultivate STEM identities. One of the project's innovations, beyond development of adaptable makerspace model involves developing an innovative patient-centered methodology for conducting educational research toward broadening participation in STEM in highly sensitive medical care environments. The project will employ a mixed-methods research design and collect a variety of data to address these areas of research including documentation of makerspace design plans and renderings, observational data gathered through fieldnotes, video and audio recordings, informal interviews with patients, their families, and child-care staff, and patient generated artifacts. Articles for researchers and practitioners will be submitted for publication to appropriate professional journals and peer-reviewed publications.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings.
This Innovations in Development 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.
While there is increased interest in youth-centered maker programs in informal educational contexts, scarce research-informed professional development exist that focus on how informal educators do or should plan and handle ongoing, just-in-time support during moments of failure. Prior research supports the important role of failure in maker programming to increase learning, resilience and other noncognitive skills such as self-efficacy and independence. The objective of this project is to address this gap through adapting, implementing, and refining a professional development program for informal educators to productively attend, interpret, and respond to youths’ experiences with failure while engaged in maker programs in informal learning contexts. In the first two years of the project, the research team will work closely with six partners to implement and refine the professional development model: The Tech Museum of Innovation, The Bakken Museum, Montshire Museum of Science, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Thinkery, and Amazeum Children’s Museum. In the last year of the project, the team will scale-up the professional development model through partnering with an additional nine institutions implementing maker programming for youth. The professional development consists of two models. In the first model, we support one to two lead facilitators at each partnering institution through an initial three-day workshop and ongoing support meetings. In the second model, the lead facilitators support other informal educators at their institution implementing making programs for youth. This project will enhance the infrastructure for research and education as collaborations and professional learning communities will be established among a variety of informal learning institutions. The project will also demonstrate a link between research and institutional and societal benefits through shifting the connotation and perceptions of failure to be valued for its educational potential and to empower informal educators to support discomfort and struggle throughout maker programs with youth.
The three goals of this collaborative project are to (a) advance the field of informal education through a research-based professional development program specific to youths’ failures during maker programs; (b) support shifts in informal educators’ facilitation practices and perspectives around youth’s failure experiences, and (c) investigate the effects of the professional development on youths’ resilience and failure mindset. The iterative nature of this project will be informed by the collection and analysis of video data of professional development sessions and informal educators facilitating maker programs, reflective journaling, surveys regarding the professional development, and pre-post surveys from youth engaged in the maker programs. Dissemination will address multiple stakeholders, including informal educators, program developers, evaluators, researchers, and public audiences.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings.
Making, which supports interest-driven skill-development and learning, has been recognized as having the potential to engage underserved youth in STEM. Makerspaces are community spaces that allow participants to create items using tools, such as 3-D printers, computer-aided design, and digital fabrication technologies. Makerspaces and making-related programs are often inaccessible, unaffordable, or simply not available to underserved youth. Digital Harbor will partner with recreation centers, two in Pittsburgh and two in Baltimore, to research, refine and implement an equity-based approach to making that will engage underserved youth aged 12-16 in making. The project will prepare out-of-school time (OST) educators to collaboratively develop culturally sensitive curricula with underserved youth to engage them in maker-based technology and computer science experiences. The project will (1) design a professional development program that will prepare and support local educators to collaboratively design and deliver localized, maker-based, STEM curricula; (2) research the impact of these programs on both educators' and youth's self-efficacy, creativity, and attitudes towards STEM; and (3) develop and evaluate an online Localization Toolkit that will prepare educators in makerspaces across the nation in using an equity-based approach to create localized content. The project will result in four new maker sites (two in Baltimore and two in Pittsburgh directly impact 4 sites (10 educators and 240 youth). The project will result several resources that will support the development and educational programs of other community sites. The resources will include the Localization Toolkit, Case Studies, Best Practices, and Research Study. The Localization Toolkit has the potential to strengthen infrastructure and capacity building in OST maker-based programs, as well as other informal and formal education programs using similar pedagogies and design principles.
The project will use a mixed-methods approach in researching the challenges and processes involved in establishing the four maker sites in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, the approaches and effectiveness of the professional development program on OST educators, and the impacts of the project of participation on the self-efficacy, creativity, and attitudes on participating youth and educators. The research study will apply several instruments and data collection sources to develop quantitative data, including youth attendance logs, the Upper Elementary and Middle/High School Student Attitudes toward STEM survey, a retrospective technology self-efficacy survey and pre-post surveys. In addition to project document review, the researchers will collect qualitative data through educator interviews, educator focus groups, and youth focus groups. Project research and resources will reach key audiences of learning scientists and OST educators through articles in peer-reviewed and practitioner journals, public events and professional conferences. These audiences will also be reached through the project website, which will share project resources. The project will reach OST sites across the country directly through dissemination partners, including the National Recreation and Parks Association, Association of Science and Technology Centers, and statewide out-of-school networks.
This Innovations in Development 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.
This three-year research and implementation project empowers middle school LatinX youth to employ their own assets and funds of knowledge to solve community problems through engineering. Only 7% of adults in the STEM job cluster are of Hispanic/Latino origin. There is a continuing need for filling engineering jobs in our current and future economy. This project will significantly broaden participation of LatinX youth in engineering activities at a critical point as they make career decisions. Design Squad Global LatinX expands on a tested model previously funded by NSF and shown to be successful. It will enable LatinX youth to view themselves as designers and engineers and to build from their strengths to expand their skills and participation in science and engineering. The project goals are to: 1) develop an innovative inclusive approach to informal engineering education for LatinX students that can broaden their engineering participation and that of other underrepresented groups, (2) to galvanize collaborations across diverse local, national, and international stakeholders to create a STEM learning ecosystem and (3) to advance knowledge about a STEM pedagogy that bridges personal-cultural identity and experience with engineering knowledge and skills. Project deliverables include a conceptual framework for a strength-based approach to engineering education for LatinX youth, a program model that is asset based, a collection of educational resources including a club guide for how to scaffold culturally responsive engineering challenge activities, an online training course for club leaders, and a mentoring strategy for university engineering students working with middle school youth. Project partners include the global education organization, iEARN, the Society of Women Engineers, and various University engineering programs.
The research study will employ an experimental study design to evaluate the impact on youth participating in the Design Squad LatinX programs. The key research questions are (1) Does participation increase students' positive perceptions of themselves and understanding of engineering and global perspectives? (2) To what extent do changes in understanding engineering vary by community (site) and by student characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity)? (3) Do educators and club leaders increase their positive perceptions of youths' funds of knowledge and their own understanding of engineering? and (4) Do university mentors increase their ability to lead informal engineering/STEM education with middle school youth? A sample from 72 local Design Squad LatinX clubs with an enrollment of 10-15 students will be drawn with half randomly assigned to the participant condition and half to the control condition. Methods used include pre and post surveys, implementation logs for checks on program implementation, site visits to carry out observations, focus groups with students and interviews with adult leaders. Data will be analyzed by estimating hierarchical linear models with observations. In addition, in-situ ethnographically-oriented observations as well as interviews at two sites will be used to develop qualitative case studies.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.