Many of the biggest problems facing the United States and the world require engineering expertise to solve: climate change, feeding a growing population, energy independence, access to clean water, crumbling infrastructure, and others. And with global economic competitiveness inextricably linked to innovation, employers across a wide range of engineering and non-engineering fields such as health care, management, and marketing are seeking employees with engineering knowledge and related skills. These skills include the ability to creatively and systematically solve ill-defined problems
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Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE)
When it comes to STEM education, the nation’s K–12 public schools cannot do it all. The nature of 21st century proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is too complex for any single institution. The good news is that schools do not have to do it alone. Museums, zoos, nature centers, aquariums, and planetariums are among the several thousand informal science institutions in the United States that regularly engage young people in observing, learning, and using STEM knowledge and skills. Providing a richness of resources unavailable in any classroom, informal science
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Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE)
This working white paper begins the process of establishing a research agenda for how to use adult volunteers most effectively to engage K-12 students in STEM subjects. It does so by describing a comprehensive review of the literature, searching for articles and papers about programs designed to increase student interest, engagement, participation and academic achievement/attainment in STEM subjects.
This article describes the development of Human +, an exhibition designed to explore the role of technology in daily life explored through the lens of technologies for people with disabilities. Reflecting the design cycle of Participatory Action Design, Human + integrated participation from people with disabilities, both as users and as designers of technology.
This article from the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) offers an introduction to the field of informal STEM education (ISE). It provides a brief survey of informal STEM education projects related to biology and discusses opportunities for scientists to become involved.
Research has intimated that engineering design activities can enhance students’ understanding of engineering and technology and can increase their interest in science. Few studies, however, have defined or measured this interest empirically. Dohn examined the effect of an eight-week engineering design competition on 46 sixth-grade students. His findings suggest that design tasks can indeed stimulate interest. He found four main sources of interest: designing inventions, trial-and-error experimentation, making the inventions work, and collaboration.
Through a critical ethnography, Birmingham and Calabrese Barton examined why and how a group of six middle school girls took civic action, defined as “educated action in science,” after studying green energy in an afterschool science program. The paper follows the students’ process in planning and implementing a carnival to engage their community in energy conservation and efficiency issues.
Dabney and colleagues examine the relationship between university students’ reported interest in STEM careers and their participation in out-of-school time science activities during middle and high school. The researchers examined the specific forms of OST science activities associated with STEM career interest and the correlations among those forms.
The present paper describes the design of teaching materials that are used as learning tools in school visits to a science museum. An exhibition on ‘A century of the Special Theory of Relativity’, in the Kutxaespacio Science Museum, in San Sebastian, Spain, was used to design a visit for first‐year engineering students at the university and assess the learning that was achieved. The first part of the paper presents the teaching sequence that was designed to build a bridge between formal teaching and the exhibition visit. The second part analyses the potential of the exhibition and the
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Jenaro GuisasolaJordi SolbesJose-Ignacio BarraguesMaite MorentinAntonio Moreno
Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the roles of the designer, the researcher and the person formerly known as the “user”. The implications of this shift for the education of designers and researchers are enormous. The evolution in design
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Elizabeth SandersPieter Jan Stappers
What if every kid had access to a real workshop? Like the ones in the corners of garages across the country: a basic array of tools, bits and pieces of hardware, piles of scrap materials and fasteners, plus stacks of unsorted boxes containing the remnants of projects gone by. Visualize also that the workshop held a few musical instruments-guitars, a keyboard, some percussion-as well as art supplies: markers, paints, clay, and the tools to shape it, ribbons glitter, beads, fabric, etc. n top of this, picture the workshop having a few hands-on exhibits to explore and manipulate-a vacuum chamber
In recent years, novel paradigms of computing have emerged, which enable computational power to be embedded in artefacts and environments in novel ways. These developments may create new possibilities for using computing to enhance learning. This paper presents the results of a design process that set out to explore interactive techniques, which utilized ubiquitous computer technology, to stimulate active participation, involvement and learning by children visiting a museum. Key stakeholders, such as museum curators and docents, were involved throughout the process of creating the exhibition