This paper attempts to reframe popular notions of “failure” as recently celebrated in the Maker Movement, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Building on Vossoughi et al.’s 2013 FabLearn publication describing how a focus on iterations/drafts can serve as an equity-oriented pedagogical move in afterschool tinkering contexts, we explore what it means for afterschool youth and educators to persist through unexpected challenges when using an iterative design process in their tinkering projects. More specifically, this paper describes: 1) how young women in a program geared toward increasing equitable
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.
The goal of our project is to develop strategies that effectively engage autistic adolescents in informal STEM learning opportunities that promote the self-efficacy and interest in STEM careers that will empower them to seek out career opportunities in STEM fields.
The research aims are to:
1. Identify evidence-based strategies to engage autistic youth in informal STEM learning opportunities that are well matched to their attentional profiles:
Hypothesis 1: Pedagogical strategies vary in how engaging they are for people with diverse attentional profiles; people with more focused
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Since 2006, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) through the Center for Integrating Research and Learning (CIRL) has offered a SciGirls Summer Camp to introduce middle school girls to various fields of science. Code: SciGirls was created in 2017 to increase the engagement in computer science studies and career paths for girls. This consistent commitment to girls in STEM led the SciGirls creators at Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) to invite CIRL to be a partner with them. In the summer of 2021, CIRL & TPT
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.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Today’s young people have a personal stake in their ability to function with data. Future job prospects might hinge on their ability to participate in the new data economy. But equally, young people are themselves the subjects of data. The datafication of young people’s lives leads to profound questions about childhood, technology, and the equity of access to STEM learning around data, one of which is this: How might young people be empowered in a data-centric world?
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Leanne BowlerMark RosinIrene Lopatovska
This award takes an innovative approach to an ongoing, pervasive, and persistent societal issue: women are still drastically underrepresented in computing careers. This project targets middle school-aged girls because it is a time when many of them lose interest and confidence in pursuing technical education and computing careers. This project will design, develop, and deploy a one-week experience focused on middle school girls that targets this issue with a novel combination of teaching techniques and technology. The project will use wearable computing devices to support girls' social interactions as they learn computing and solve technical challenges together. The goals of the project are to raise interest, perceived competence, and involvement in the computational ability of girls. Additionally, the project aims to increase a sense of computational community for girls that makes pursuing computational skills more relevant to their identities and lives, and that helps continued participation in computing. The project will deploy a one-week experience four times per year with a socioeconomically diverse range of campers. The project will also develop a 'program in a box' kit that can be broadly used by others wishing to deliver a similar experience for girls.
The planned research will determine if a one-week experience that uses social wearable construction in the context of live-action role play can use the mediating process of computational community formation to positively impact middle school girls' engagement with and interest in computation. Computational community is defined as girls engaging together in the process of learning computation, trading resources and knowledge, and supporting growth. Research participants will include 100 6th to 9th-grade girls. At least 75% of the participants will be either low income, first-generation college-bound, or underrepresented in higher education. Students will be recruited through the longstanding partnerships with title one schools in the Salinas Valley, the Educational Partnership Center, and in the Pajaro Valley Unified School district, where 82% of the students are Hispanic/Latinx, 42% are English Learners, and 73% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. The research questions are: 1) Does the proposed experience increase girls' self-reported competence, self-efficacy, and interest in computational skills and careers? and 2) Will the proposed experience lead to activity-based evidence of learning and integration of computational skills at the group social level? The project will use a mixed-methods, design-based research approach which is an iterative design process to rapidly collect and analyze data, and regularly discuss the implications for practice with the design team. Data will be collected using observations, interviews, focus groups, surveys, and staff logs. Quantitative data will be analyzed using frequencies, means, and measures of dispersion will be applied to survey data from both time points. Pearson correlation coefficients will be used to describe the bivariate relationship between continuous factors. ANOVAs will assess whether there are significant differences in continuous measures across groups. Qualitative data will be analyzed using a constant comparison method.
This Innovations in Development award 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.
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.
Many people with autism are unemployed and isolated because they do not have access to educational opportunities that support them in finding jobs that match their potential. This research seeks to empower adolescents with autism to seek out careers that are well-matched with their strengths and interests. Many people with autism are interested in computing, a marketable skill. This project builds from this interest by developing strategies to effectively engage teenagers with autism. Although people with autism share a diagnosis, each person is unique and has the capacity to become a visionary and transformer in society in their own way. Teenagers with autism will be invited to participate in a game design workshop hosted by an award-winning, not-for-profit Tech Kids Unlimited. Teenagers often enjoy learning how to design games and can learn many useful skills through design. During each workshop, teenagers will rate different teaching strategies using a picture-based survey developed in collaboration with people with autism. It is expected that teenagers with autism who have difficulty focusing to be most engaged by strategies that include multiple types of information (for example, pictures, text, and speech). The team also expects those who are more focused to be most engaged by strategies with fewer sources of information. By developing clear guidelines to help educators match their teaching styles to how different students learn, the project will help them engage youth more effectively. Through an iterative process, the team will revise the game design workshop to make it more engaging for people with different types of autism. New groups of teenagers with autism will participate in improved game design workshops that include an internship in a technology company. An important outcome is to understand which strategies are engaging for young people with autism that help them develop the belief in their skills needed to seek out fulfilling careers. This award is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
This Research in Service to Practice project has the following aims: 1) Identify evidence-based strategies to engage youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in informal STEM learning opportunities that are well matched to their attentional profiles, 2) Determine if engaging youth with ASD in informal STEM learning opportunities increases their STEM self-efficacy, and 3) Determine if engagement with STEM internship activities is associated with increased interest in STEM careers and career decision-making self-efficacy. Principles of Universal Design (UD) and Mayer's principles of effective multimedia instruction are frameworks employed to identify instructional strategies that are emotionally engaging for youth with diverse attentional profiles. The degree to which attentional differences contribute to different patterns of emotional engagement with informal STEM learning will be investigated. Guided by assessments of youth's engagement with different learning opportunities, 'diversity blueprints' or specific instructional strategies that help youth with diverse attentional profiles engage will be developed. After identifying strategies to engage neurodivergent (neurologically diverse) youth in informal STEM learning opportunities, the extent to which these strategies generalize to STEM internship sites will be explored. The team will study potential specificity of the types of contexts that promote different types of self-efficacy, with engagement with extracurricular STEM learning opportunities expected to preferentially target STEM self-efficacy while engagement with internships targets career decision-making self-efficacy. Although UD is often endorsed to promote STEM learning among students with disabilities, the proposed research would be the first iterative adaptation of instructional strategies designed to engage neurodivergent teens in informal STEM learning guided by a systematic analysis of how they engage with and feel about instructional strategies. Project deliverables include workshops for local after-school program providers, publications, a project website, and a multimodal guide of the process of developing 'diversity blueprints' and how to apply them for informal STEM educators and researchers.
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.