Technology

Taking STEM Enrichment Camps Virtual: Strategies & Reflections from Quick Pivot Due to COVID-19

Engineering
Science
Technology
Broadening Participation
Gaming/Virtual Environments
Middle

Since COVID-19 began spreading in the US and quickly established as a global pandemic in March of 2020, the NSF-funded STEM SEALS team at North Florida College faced the touch decision to either

Author/Presenter

Rebecca Zulli Lowe

Adrienne Smith

Christie Prout

G. G. Maresch

Christopher Bacot

Lura Sapp

Bill Eustace

Lead Organization(s)
North Florida Community College (NFCC)
Year
2021
Short Description

This exploratory study aimed to (1) identify the  barriers to moving STEM enrichment programming in a rural environment from in-person to virtual activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) describe key decisions that were made in transitioning to the virtual format along with the rationale behind those decisions, and (3) disseminate best practices that emerged from the inaugural effort.

Resource(s)
Submission_3.9.2021.pdf

STEM Sea, Air, and Land Remotely Operated Vehicle Design Challenges for Rural, Middle School Youth

Principal Investigator:
Guenter Maresch
STEM SEALs builds collaborative partnerships between North Florida College and local middle schools to bolster STEM pathways for students in this region. It involves the development of inexpensive, rigorous, and versatile design challenges to expose rural middle school students to high quality STEM experiences. Researchers study the feasibility and efficacy of these experiences to promote greater awareness of STEM pathways, increase readiness for STEM study; and generate student identity as STEM-able, STEM-skilled, and STEM-belonging.
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Discipline/Topic:
Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Curriculum
Target Audience:
Middle School

Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing (Collaborative Research: Passonneau and Puntambekar)

Principal Investigator:
Sadhana Puntambekar
This project will design a sociotechnical system to automatically assess students written scientific explanations during science problem solving. The project will use two complementary mechanisms to provide feedback: automated assessment and feedback to students’ science explanations using using NLP techniques, and feedback to teachers provided through aggregated data about students’ writing generated by the system.
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Discipline/Topic:
Science
Technology
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
Middle School

Professional Development Supports for Teaching Bioinformatics through Mobile Learning

Principal Investigator:
Susan Yoon
Bioinformatics is an emerging area of research that develops new knowledge through computational analysis of vast biological data. This project investigates the professional development (PD) supports needed for teaching bioinformatics at the high school. Building from a robust literature in PD design research, project team worked with science teachers to co-design instructional modules to engage students with core bioinformatics concepts and data literacies, by focusing on local community health issues supported through mobile learning activities.
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Discipline/Topic:
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Classroom Practice
Curriculum
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Educational Technology
Professional Development
Target Audience:
High School

PBS News Hour Student Reporting Labs StoryMaker: STEM-Integrated Student Journalism

Principal Investigator:
Leah Clapman
Sneak peek at StoryMaker, a video storytelling platform /educator co-learning community supporting students to produce videos about STEM projects.
PI: Leah Clapman, PBS NewsHour
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Discipline/Topic:
Science
Technology
Broadening Participation
Classroom Practice
Curriculum
Educational Technology
Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Target Audience:
Middle School
High School

Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

Principal Investigator:
Jamie Mikeska

This poster provides an overview of our three-year project where researchers are using a design-based research approach to develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary practice-based activities that teacher education programs can deploy to provide practice-based learning opportunities for preservice teachers. The goal is to help the preservice teachers to engage in authentic, purposeful, and scaffolded approximations of practice as they develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science.

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Discipline/Topic:
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Assessment
Curriculum
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
Post-secondary

Assessing College-Ready Computational Thinking (Collaborative Research: Brown and Wilson)

Principal Investigator:
Mark Wilson

This project seeks to develop and validate learning progressions and items with dynamic features to generate machine-scorable student responses for assessing computational thinking, in a test of college-ready critical reasoning skills, and to integrate these items into an existing online assessment system, the Berkeley Assessment System Software (BASS). This assessment is intended to be useful for formative and summative purposes in high-school and introductory college-level STEM classes, including mathematics and computer science courses.

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Discipline/Topic:
Computer Science
Technology
Assessment
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
High School
Post-secondary

Anchoring High School Students in Real-Life Issues that Integrate STEM Content and Literacy

Principal Investigator:
Amy Lannin

Through the integration of STEM content and literacy, this project studies the ways teachers implement literacy practices in the STEM classroom. Teachers will facilitate instruction using scenarios that present students with STEM-related issues, presented as scenarios. After reading and engaging with math and science content, students write a source-based argument in which they state a claim, support the claim with evidence from the texts, and explain the multiple perspectives on the issue.

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Discipline/Topic:
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Assessment
Curriculum
Target Audience:
Middle School
High School

“Zooming In” on Robotics during COVID-19: A Preservice Teacher, an Engineering Student, and a 5th Grader Engineer Robotic Flowers via Zoom

Engineering
Technology
Educational Technology
Elementary
Undergraduate
Graduate

The COVID-19 induced school shutdown dramatically decreased students’ hands-on STEM learning opportunities. An NSF-funded program partnering preservice teachers and undergraduate engineering students to teach robotics to fifth graders was adapted to a virtual format via Zoom. A case study intimately explored one team’s experience as they engineered bio-inspired robots over five weekly sessions. Zoom recordings, written reflections, and lesson slides were analyzed to describe how the virtual context shaped the lesson and influenced the preservice teacher’s experience.

Author/Presenter

Jennifer Kidd

Krishna Kaipa

Kristie Gutierrez

Pilar Pazos

Orlando Ayala

Stacie Ringleb

Lead Organization(s)
Old Dominion University (ODU)
Year
2020
Short Description

An NSF-funded program partnering preservice teachers and undergraduate engineering students to teach robotics to fifth graders was adapted to a virtual format via Zoom. A case study intimately explored one team’s experience as they engineered bio-inspired robots over five weekly sessions.

Resource(s)
___Zooming_In____on_Robotics_during_COVID_19__A_Preservice_Teacher__an_Engineering_Student__and_a_5t.pdf

Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program) Full Proposal Deadline

Event Date
Sponsoring Organization
National Science Foundation (NSF)

Learn more at https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505512&org=EHR&sel_org….

Discipline/Topic
Engineering
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Event Type
Funding Opportunity
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