Afterschool continues to be promoted as a complementary setting to school for strengthening science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education (for example, Krishnamurthi, Bevan, Rinehart, & Coulon, 2013). This is a reasonable idea: 10.2 million children and youth in the U.S. participate in structured afterschool programs (Afterschool Alliance, 2014), and the flexibility of afterschool settings allows for innovative approaches to STEM exploration and engagement.
A program that teaches middle-school Latinas to program their own computer games seeks ways of overcoming the growing shortfall of both Latinos and women in IT education and careers.
This article describes the Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP), an ongoing, intensive after school computer-mediated art technology program begun in 1996 by the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) in Tucson, Arizona. This five-semester program targets at-risk middle school youth from disadvantaged families. Students worked with professional artist/teachers, learning to do computer graphics and publishing, language arts and word processing, computer animation and video production.
Community technology centers (CTCs) help bridge the digital divide for immigrant youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods. A study of six CTCs in California shows that these centers also promote positive youth development for young people who are challenged to straddle two cultures.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rebecca LondonManuel PastorRachel Rosner
This paper outlines the need for sustainable, scalable afterschool computer science programs targeting girls and describes the development of one such curriculum. Evaluation research on girls’ learning of computer science and on the capacity of afterschool staff and organizations to provide computer science programming leads to our description of a research-based approach to sustaining and scaling the program nationally—an approach that other programs might use to expand their reach and impact.
In recent years, afterschool programs have come to be envisioned as sites for addressing the failure of urban schools to provide adolescents with the requisite skills and knowledge to participate in a rapidly shifting social, political, and economic landscape. The purpose and nature of such educational endeavors has taken many varied forms, as a growing number of stakeholders become invested in shaping the direction and implementation of afterschool programming. However, youth, as the recipients of these programs, have rarely been looked to as sources of experiential knowledge about the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine SchultzEdward BrockenbroughJaskiran Dhillon
Responding to the expressed needs of the field, the U.S. Department of Education is building You for Youth (Y4Y), an online learning community whose modules will enhance the professional development of afterschool practitioners and program managers.