Resources from STEM Smart Workshops

ASSET Inc. is an education improvement not-for-profit organization in Pennsylvania that supports school districts and charter and private schools in implementing a standards-based science education program through teacher professional development aligned with hands-on, minds-on curriculum materials for grades K−8. The ASSET program is designed to help classroom teachers and their students meet and exceed the benchmarks set by national standardized tests. The curriculum focuses directly on what students need to know to meet those standards. Its professional development empowers teachers, providing the techniques and tools that turn scientific lessons into tangible, exciting concepts that students can touch, see, inquire about, and understand. Independent evaluation results show that fourth-grade students in ASSET member schools scored statistically significantly higher than their peers in science. Based on a proven track record of results, ASSET was selected by the U.S. Department of Education to receive a coveted five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) grant to establish Regional Professional Development Centers across Pennsylvania as well as an advanced professional development program for teachers in rural and high-needs schools.

Music contributes substantially to every culture on Earth, and the enjoyment of music is universal. Historically, the primary exposure to music has been through live performance, providing audiences an opportunity for interaction with the musicians and music, but today the vast majority of music is experienced through recordings. And though recent digital audio technologies have had a tremendous impact on the world of recorded music, its fundamental nature remains unchanged: once a recording is made, that single performance is forever fixed, preventing any true interaction with the listener. The activities of this NSF CAREER award integrate research in digital audio technology with educational activities under a common vision of transforming the act of listening to “recorded” music into an interactive experience in which the “performance” responds to the creative input of the listener. This project also supports the Summer Music Technology (SMT) high school outreach program, which uses music technology to attract students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by demonstrating the contributions of these disciplines to modern music production as well as the creativity inherent within STEM and related fields.

Several government funded projects are developing facet-based, diagnostic formative assessments to support teachers in understanding and addressing their students’ conceptual strengths and weaknesses and to promote students’ conceptual change in science at the middle school level, high school level and beyond. These projects bring together experts in assessment, science education, science teaching, and science content from SRI International, FACET Innovations, Sonoma State University, University of Illinois Chicago, Seattle Pacific University and the University of Washington. Supported by research on students' preconceptions, particularly in science, and their need to build on the knowledge and skills that students bring to the classroom, the projects are aimed at implementing a facets-of-thinking perspective for the improvement of formative assessment, learning, and instruction in precollege science classrooms.

Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs), funded by the National Science Foundation, are environmental laboratories established to study the chemical, physical and biological processes that shape the Earth’s surface. Little is known about how these processes are coupled and at what temporal and spatial scales. CZO research seeks to understand these couplings through monitoring and modeling at the watershed scale. As part of this research initiative, CZO sites are encouraged to bring research to K–12 students in the field and in their classrooms. The three Pennsylvania-based CZOs represented here have developed innovative education projects that illustrate the research of Earth’s Critical Zone: (1) a STEM academy that emphasizes hands-on activities with students in the field; (2) an after-school science club where students learn about soil characteristics and how they reflect the ecosystems where the soils formed; (3) programs where middle-school students build environmental sensors to investigate the environment of their school yard; (4) a data visualization portal that provides real-time data on CZO research that can be used in middle and high school math and science classrooms; and (5) stream-table demonstrations that allow students to experience hand-on science in their own classrooms.

The PBS TV series and website Design Squad, and its spin off series Design Squad Nation, are designed to get its viewers involved in engineering through an integrated media experience and grassroots outreach campaign. Design Squad is a reality competition series where six teenagers learn to think smart, build fast, and contend with a wild array of engineering challenges. With Design Squad Nation, engineer co-hosts Judy and Adam travel across the country, working side by side with kids to turn their dreams into reality. Our ultimate goal with both projects is to inspire viewers to take on their own hands-on engineering activities. To achieve this, developers have created an online community for user-generated content. In local communities, PBS has staged public events that get kids engaged in hands-on design challenges. And, through its outreach, PBS has provided approaches for modeling the design process with kids through trainings; educational resources; and support for teachers, engineers, and informal educators. A new project—Design Squad: Informal Pathways to Engineering—will use existing assets from Design Squad, along with new resources, as the vehicle for researching the diverse pathways children take while pursuing an interest in engineering. WGBH, in collaboration with Purdue University and Concord Evaluation Group (CEG), will conduct a qualitative, longitudinal study of 60 middle school children, representing a range of geographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, that will examine the ways in which informal engineering programs support (or fail to support) children’s engineering-related interests, outcome expectations, and self-efficacy.

Building upon previous collaborative work with small humanoid robots, this project is embarking on an ambitious new research project involving multiple adult-sized humanoids. There is an overwhelming disparity in terms of resources devoted to humanoids research in the United States versus research in other countries that have heavily invested in this area of robotics. The goal of this ambitious five-year project is to rapidly advance U.S. humanoid research by developing a common open platform. To date, all full-sized humanoids have been individual custom-made units, and advances made using one design do not necessarily translate to others. Currently, Drexel is the only institution in the United States that has HUBO, a world-class adult-sized humanoid developed at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST), resulting from a prior NSF Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) award. Building upon the unique expertise developed at Drexel in assembling and maintaining HUBO, the proposed platform will significantly extend its current capabilities, resulting in six identical units. The project’s goal is to develop a new common platform (HUBO+) that will consist of the world’s first homogenous full-sized humanoid team, and each of the participating schools will have access to a HUBO+ unit to enhance their research efforts. The project partners include researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, U.Penn, USC, and Virginia Tech, representing a critical mass of humanoids research in the United States. Current humanoids are rarely autonomous and not ready for unconstrained interaction with humans. Having a consistent platform will facilitate rapid progress in areas needed for autonomy and natural interaction, including mobility, manipulation, vision, speech communication and cognition, and learning. Furthermore, humanoids research is inherently interdisciplinary and integrative, and catalyzes interest in engineering among younger students. The project’s outreach partners, including several high-profile museums, will introduce people of all ages to the technologies of robotics, particularly useful for recruiting K–12 students into science, engineering, and mathematics.

Exploring Computer Science (ECS) is a computer science (CS) curriculum designed in response to research findings about the severe limitations of Advanced Placement CS in engaging more than a narrow band of students. ECS is a year-long college-preparatory course, consisting of six units, including problem-solving, Web design, introduction to programming, robotics and data analysis. Designed to introduce students to the foundational, creative, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and problem-solving nature of computer science, ECS is offered in 27 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the second largest district in the country. It is also offered in San Jose, Chicago, and Puerto Rico. ECS addresses the injustices of historically denied computer science education to underrepresented populations while also providing students with an engaging yet rigorous experience. ECS teachers are at the core of this effort to increase access to computer science knowledge. They are supported with a professional learning community, in-classroom coaching, and on-going professional development. ECS and Into the Loop, a K–12/university partnership dedicated to increasing equity and access to quality computer science learning in public schools, has been a catalyst and foundation for Mobilize, an NSF CISE and Math Science Partnership-supported project. At the heart of Mobilize is “participatory sensing”—a method of data collection and analysis in which students will use mobile phones and Web services to systematically collect and interpret data about issues important to them and their communities.

FLEXE is a science education project that helps students gain an understanding of local and extreme environments, the interconnected Earth system and the process of science. As part of the project, students collect data in their local environment and compare them with equivalent data from partner schools and from an extreme environment, namely the deep sea. Hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are among the extreme environments being compared. Students participate in three main activities: (1) protocol-driven fieldwork and analysis, and analysis of data from an extreme environment; (2) Web-based interactions with scientists and students from partner schools; and (3) culminating activities that include reporting and peer review. FLEXE provides an online system for exploring learning activities developed for the project and for facilitating interactions between students and between students and scientists. Through the FLEXE Forum, collaborating scientists present intriguing deep sea datasets to students along with scientific questions for them to answer, and provide feedback on their responses in a timely manner. Evaluation is central to the project. FLEXE combines program evaluation with hypothesis-based research to explicitly test effects of various program components on student learning and attitudes towards science. FLEXE was developed at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Science and the Schools in collaboration with the Globe Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment program and the NSF deep sea research program Ridge2000.

GEAR UP is a national initiative that seeks to increase the number of students in specific target populations who are prepared to enter and succeed in post-secondary education. The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The Pennsylvania Academy for the Profession of Teaching and Learning, part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, provides services for nearly 14,000 students in the Harrisburg School District and the School District of Philadelphia through partnerships with the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency and the two school districts. The program includes activities directed at raising academic performance through (1) early intervention services; (2) professional development; (3) pre-service teacher education; (4) parent programs; and (5) last dollar scholarships to eligible students for postsecondary education.

This PIRE project is a collaborative project that engages each member’s unique resources, including electro-mechanical design (Korean collaborators), virtual HUBO (Bryn Mawr), online HUBO and co-op program (Drexel), mini-HUBO (Virginia Tech), advanced locomotion (UPenn) and human-robot interaction (Swarthmore). Humanoids are bipedal robots engineered to mimic human locomotion, balance, and coordination. The Honda ASIMO, Sony QRIO, and KAIST HUBO are adult-sized humanoids that have captured public interest and give researchers insight on issues including dynamic walking, coordinated motor control, perception, and human-robot interaction. A coherent, effective, and innovative model is presented for international collaboration and will enable faculty, undergraduates, and doctorial students to cycle through Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The goal is to deliver a three-tier tool set—virtual, mini-, and online HUBO—filling a critical gap that prevents a vertical advance in robotics, namely the lack of platforms to consolidate knowledge, assess approaches, and benchmark performance. This toolset will provide the community with multiple points of entry to engage in advancing humanoid capabilities with far reaching impacts. To reach the next generation of robotic scientists and engineers, the PIRE team is working closely with the Philadelphia Please Touch Museum (PTM) to design exhibits featuring HUBO to inspire and motivate students to pursue science and engineering careers.