The Bay Area Discovery Museum will address the need for STEM education by delivering engineering outreach programming to schools and libraries throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The museum's mobile engineering lab, Try It Truck, will introduce the engineering design process to students and teachers in grades K-5 with hands-on activities (both on and off the truck) where they can collaborate, experiment, and design solutions to engineering challenges. The Try It Truck will serve 21,600 children, parents, and educators throughout the Bay Area, with at least 50 percent of all participants coming from underserved communities and Title I schools. The museum will work with an external evaluator to design survey instruments for both formative and summative evaluation, analyze summative evaluation data, and produce a report. Museum staff will share project results with colleagues at national and statewide conferences.
The data collection procedure and process is one of the most critical components in a research study that affects the findings. Problems in data collection may directly influence the findings, and consequently, may lead to questionable inferences. Despite the challenges in data collection, this study provides insights for STEM education researchers and practitioners on effective data collection, in order to ensure that the data is useful for answering questions posed by research. Our engineering education research study was a part of a three-year, NSF funded project implemented in the Midwest
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ibrahim YeterAnastasia Marie RynearsonHoda EhsanAnnwesa DasguptaBarbara FagundesMuhsin MeneskeMonica Cardella
Engineering is a critical yet understudied topic in early childhood. Previous research has shown that even young children can engage in (versions of) engineering design practices and processes that are similar to those of adult engineers and designers. In this session, we will share and discuss current research projects to explore how different in-school and out-of-school contexts and activities support 3- to 8-year-old children as they engage in engineering design. We will consider ways that the different characteristics of the activities and spaces, as well as the practices of teachers
This exploratory study aims to better understand how adults engage with science in the context of reallife socio-scientific issues (SSIs). Specifically, we examined how parents engage with the issue of radiation from Wi-Fi routers in schools, an issue encountered by parents across the world. Radiation from wireless internet connection (Wi-Fi) routers is a type of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. Nowadays, exposure to RF radiation is widespread; from Wi-Fi routers in workplaces, homes, restaurants, and even buses and trains to cell phones and microwave ovens. The proliferation of