Yasmin Kafai - US grants

9804939
Franke

Successful reform in mathematics education requires the integration of research and theory drawn from different fields. From our perspective, changing schools requires working with both teachers and students, with content and children's thinking, and with tools and how they are used, all concurrently. In the past, researchers engaged in understanding reform often studied either teachers or learners, content or children's thinking, tools or their use. These researchers provide a rich source of knowldege about these issues; we draw upon their work to create a model, GAMES, for both teacher and student development that integrates these different areas and addresses them concurrently.

This conference proposal seeks to inform and promote the CAREER program among Education researchers at the American Education Research Association. The presentations will focus on the diversity of funded research efforts as well as on the experiences of four awardees. To maximize attendance at the session, information will be distributed to potential applicants prior to the conference by mailings to schools of Education and other graduate schools.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation is producing a summary of what has been learned from projects funded by NSF and the AAUW Educational Foundation from 1993 through 2001.

Both organizations have funded research and demonstration projects in education, particularly science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education, that increase the participation of girls and women, and provide equal access to learning. The research team will summarize what is found in a number of areas, including gender differences in math and science skills and performance, differences among girls due to ethnicity and race, successful approaches that engage female students, factors that influence girls and women to pursue study in these fields, critical junctures for female SMET majors in higher education, and determinants to persistence at the graduate level. The study will use findings, evaluation results and accounts of innovative efforts reported in 175 projects funded by NSF and 200 projects funded by AAUW Educational Foundation.

The published synthesis of findings and results will be disseminated widely to education policy makers, teachers and administrators via AAUW's publishing and marketing programs.

ITR: A Networked, Media-Rich Programming Environment to Enhance Informal Learning and Technological Fluency at Community Technology Centers The MIT Media Laboratory and UCLA propose to develop and study a new networked, media-rich programming environment, designed specifically to enhance the development of technological fluency at after-school centers in economically disadvantaged communities. This new programming environment (to be called Scratch) will be grounded in the practices and social dynamics of Computer Clubhouses, a network of after-school centers where youth (ages 10-18) from low-income communities learn to express themselves with new technologies. We will study how Clubhouse youth (ages 10-18) learn to use Scratch to design and program new types of digital-arts projects, such as sensor-controlled music compositions, special-effects videos created with programmable image-processing filters, robotic puppets with embedded controllers, and animated characters that youth trade wirelessly via handheld devices. Scratch's networking infrastructure, coupled with its multilingual capabilities, will enable youth to share their digital-arts creations with other youth across geographic, language, and cultural boundaries.

This research will advance understanding of the effective and innovative design of new technologies to enhance learning in after-school centers and other informal-education settings, and it will broaden opportunities for youth from under-represented groups to become designers and inventors with new technologies. We will iteratively develop our technologies based on ongoing interaction with youth and staff at Computer Clubhouses. The use of Scratch at Computer Clubhouses will serve as a model for other after-school centers in economically-disadvantaged communities, demonstrating how informal-learning settings can support the development of technological fluency, enabling young people to design and program projects that are meaningful to themselves and their communities.

This proposal from UCLA requests funds to send junior researchers to the International Conference of the Learning Sciences and to provide them with specialized sessions to develop their research skills. The proposal will fund travel for 15 graduate students who will be chosen to represent a range of institutions, individuals and areas of specialty. Participants will be expected to prepare a short summary of their research goals as part of the application process and to prepare a presentation for the meeting itself.

The purpose of our exploratory research is to expand the study of science inquiry by investigating the potential of immersive simulations. In immersive simulations, such as the case of a disease outbreak, participants not only act out roles in a simulation, but through virtual selves, or avatars, are directly impacted by the simulation. For immersive simulations to be an effective learning experience, students' inquiry into the simulation needs to be scaffolded. This study uses a large stratified random sample of about 800 Whyville users accounting for age, gender and level of involvement; and it develops and refines online tools to support the collaborative investigation of disease simulations and the development of explanations. The study will examine: (1) the educational impact of immersive science simulations, (2) the adoption of established web-based inquiry tools developed in the education community for multi-user online environments; and (3) the nature of online and offline support structures for science inquiry in settings such as classrooms, after school programs, and homes which provide access to places like Whyville.

The Classroom Ecosystem Explorer (CEE), a proof of concept project, is designed to assist K-3 teachers in teaching life and physical science for conceptual understanding. CEE integrates videos, stills and voice-over into one multimedia web-based tool. The video presentations are organized to teach practicing or pre-service teachers to analyze complex classroom dynamics and students' preconceptions, scientific understandings or misconceptions. CEE is intended for use in teacher education and professional development programs. The program provides teachers with experiences in understanding details related to the "how" of high quality science teaching. The professional development activities illuminate what happens in planning and in arranging science classrooms to promote student learning. The project will implement a quasi-experimental research design where researchers compare the implementation of three models. This project impacts approximately 30 teachers and an estimated 600 students.

Multidisciplinary teams composed of computer scientists, arts and computer science educators, and learning scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Indiana University are researching how to encourage about 400 youth (ages 10-18) to creatively engage with computational textiles in afterschool and school settings. Computational textiles?textile artifacts that are computationally generated or that contain embedded computers?will capture youths? pre-existing interests in new media, fashion, and design while supporting learning and creativity in computer science, arts, design, and engineering.

The PIs are designing a new programming toolkit for 3D textile design to promote creativity and to study these tools in different workshop settings in afterschool and classroom programs. While previous efforts have focused on developing environments for 2D and 3D programming for novices, their goal is to expand these efforts to include 3D textile design to appeal to disadvantaged youth not normally drawn into computing. Moreover, they are developing an open, participatory website that allows youth to display their created artifacts and share, discuss, and remix their designs. These efforts build on our prior successes developing an online community around Scratch, which now hosts over 10,000 designers. They are engaging local youth communities and professional advisors from a variety of backgrounds to identify and encourage creative design solutions as part of their efforts to build this community, the first-ever youth community of computational textile designers.

The proposal leverages several successful developments: (1) a construction kit for building computational textiles called the LilyPad Arduino that makes this domain widely accessible for the first time; (2) research on a media-rich programming environment, Scratch, that is used by a worldwide community of designers of all ages; and (3) a conceptual framework of media arts in K-12 education that describes and analyzes creative digital production.

Using Csikszentmihalyi?s system model (1988, 1997), the PIs define creativity as the dynamic interaction between an individual?s contributions to a domain and community recognition within the field. To investigate the different components of creativity as a system, this project focuses on the technical, artistic and critical practices in youth? designs and interactions and employs a variety of assessment approaches including mixed methods data analyses of recorded group interactions, interviews with youth designers and professional artists, case studies of designers and artifacts, and log file data tracking online community participation and commentaries.

Intellectual Merit: This project presents a novel opportunity to study creativity within an emergent IT field (i.e., computational textiles and their applications) and will contribute to creativity research by providing empirically validated accounts of the system nature of creativity captured in interactions between individual designers and community feedback. Furthermore, they are developing tools for how to tailor programming to support 3D textile design, investigate an online community for sharing and validating creative computational textile designs, and investigate learning approaches in workshop models for computational textiles design for novice programmers.

Broader Impact: The proposed tools and activities broaden opportunities for youth from disadvantaged communities to develop advanced IT fluency skills by designing computationally enhanced materials and artifacts and contribute in meaningful ways to the emergent field of computational textile design. The implementation and assessment is conducted in workshops at after school sites that vary strategically in their technology experience to allow for a broader dissemination of the developed tools and activities. The findings from the work is shared with youth coordinators at professional development meetings, is presented at national conferences, and is disseminated further in academic journals and through their website.

The University of Pennsylvania proposes to develop and deploy a new CS service-learning course at the college level which will be integrated with the cascading mentoring of high and middle school students. The course - called College Service Learning Course to Promote and Increase COMPutational Thinking and ACTion (Penn COMP-ACT) - will train college students to teach K-12 computational activities. Penn COMP-ACT undergraduates will learn about computational thinking, and then they will teach and mentor high school and middle students in coordinated summer workshops and afterschool programs. The high school students will be engaged to work with the middle school students as well. This "learning-by-teaching" approach will improve all of the student's understanding of computational thinking and purposes by exposure to a variety of hands-on software design activities and materials. The Penn COMP-ACT course leverages several prior successful efforts including a pilot service-learning course set up in the CS course program, and the existing partnerships and programs within CS and Penn to recruit girls and minorities from the local community. It will be lead by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, computer science and K-12 educators.

This project's aim is to understand collaboration, cooperation, and learning in the context of a large, distributed virtual organization consisting of children and teachers building web-based simulations and animations using the Scratch software. The PIs will study the nature and patterns of cooperation in the Scratch decentralized learning environment, establish principles to guide the development of systems that foster cooperative attitudes and behaviors, and develop strategies to cultivate computational-thinking capacities that are important for productive cooperation and problem-solving in virtual organizations. The Scratch community consists of over 400,000 registered members discussing, remixing, and reusing more than a million projects. The project is a collaborative project with researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania drawn from computer science, psychology, child development, education, organizational science, and economics.

Using a novel combination of experimental and ethnographic methods, the research will provide insights into how young people cooperate in virtual organizations, their attitudes and motivations related to cooperation, and their development of computational-thinking skills and capacities necessary for productive cooperation and creative learning. The researchers expect that the findings will contribute to the design and understanding of more effective virtual organizations, particularly in the areas of learning, education, and cooperative creation. The methods used include observational studies, design interventions, and field experiments. The test bed will be the Scratch community and the evaluations will be done by mining the online record of cooperation in the construction of new simulations and animations.

The outcomes of the project will include an improved Scratch environment, design principles for the construction of distributed virtual organizations that encourage cooperation and co-construction of knowledge and artifacts, and new methods of teaching computational thinking in an engaging environment. The Scratch community of 400,000 members will be part of this work. This project is potentially transformative because of the engaging nature of this particular application, because of its applicability to similar virtual communities, and because of its promise to reach a diverse community of learners.

This project supports the development of technological fluency and understanding of STEM concepts through the implementation of design collaboratives that use eCrafting Collabs as the medium within which to work with middle and high school students, parents and the community. The researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute combine expertise in learning sciences, digital media design, computer science and informal science education to examine how youth at ages 10-16 and families in schools, clubs, museums and community groups learn together how to create e-textile artifacts that incorporate embedded computers, sensors and actuators. The project investigates the feasibility of implementing these collaboratives using eCrafting via three models of participation, individual, structured group and cross-generational community groups. They are designing a portal through which the collaborative can engage in critique and sharing of their designs as part of their efforts to build a model process by which scientific and engineered product design and analysis can be made available to multiple audiences.

The project engages participants through middle and high school elective classes and through the workshops conducted by a number of different organizations including the Franklin Institute, Techgirlz, the Hacktory and schools in Philadelphia. Participants can engage in the eCrafting Collabs through individual, collective and community design challenges that are established by the project. Participants learn about e-textile design and about circuitry and programming using either ModKit or the text-based Arduino. The designs are shared through the eCrafting Collab portal and participants are required to provide feedback and critique. Researchers are collecting data on learner identity in relation to STEM and computing, individual and collective participation in design and student understanding of circuitry and programming. The project is an example of a scalable intervention to engage students, families and communities in developing technological flexibility.

This research and development project provides a resource that engages students in middle and high schools in technology rich collaborative environments that are alternatives to other sorts of science fairs and robotic competitions. The resources developed during the project will inform how such an informal/formal blend of student engagement might be scaled to expand the experiences of populations of underserved groups, including girls. The study is conducting an examination of the new types of learning activities that are multiplying across the country with a special focus on cross-generational learning.

The University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University will investigate how American Indian youth, communities, and pre-service teachers learn and design with computational textiles. Computational or e-textiles,textile artifacts that contain embedded computers or are computationally generated, are promising portals into youths' existing interests in new media and design and connecting them to computer science education by using indigenous communities' existing craft practices and thus strengthening school-community relationships. The EthnoEtextiles project expands e-textiles in new directions by integrating the following successful developments and NSF work: (1) a computational construction kit, the Lilypad Arduino, that can promote the type of technology fluency missing in students' creative explorations with technology; (2) teacher professional development approaches that encourage culturally relevant and reflective teaching with technology; and (3) workshop models that create connections among youth, members of their community, and their cultural heritage. The purpose is to develop relationships and workshop models for youth and teachers that can become a platform for larger systemic and sustainable initiatives in computer science education for American Indian youth, teachers, and community members. The proposed project will contribute to our growing understanding of teaching and learning with electronic textiles in computer science education and help diversify participation by reaching traditionally underserved communities of American Indian peoples.

Serious games and games for learning are designed to foster learning or engagement with real-world events or processes or for solving complex problems. Citizen involvement in serious games and games for learning has increased exponentially in the last decade. At the same time, it is becoming clear that these activities can play an important, possibly profound, role in fostering learning if they are designed and used well to do that. When students engage in game design, this can also be important for fostering participation and learning -- in computing and other STEM disciplines, and beyond. But little is known about how to take into account gender and ethnicity in integrating games for learning into educational activities. This workshop will focus on special research issues in designing games for learning and effectively using them to foster STEM engagement and learning among two populations under-represented in STEM -- women/girls and minorities. The team will also deliver a set of talks based on the workshop and will produce an edited volume that will present the results of the workshop to the many different research, development, and education communities that can benefit from understanding gender and ethnicity issues in fostering learning, the challenges in addressing those issues, what is already known about addressing those issues, and what still needs to be learnrd to address them more fully and put what is known into practice.

Serious game play and game design have both been shown to foster excitement about STEM and STEM learning when designed and used well for those purposes. The PIs aim to better understand how to broaden participation of minorities and women in computational thinking and computing and to help those populations become more interested and conversant in STEM topics. There is much research that shows the potential for serious games to foster such engagement and learning, and their focus is on how to use such resources well in fostering participation and learning among girls and minority groups under-represented in computing and other STEM disciplines. They will bring together researchers whose expertise is design of serious games and games for learning, public policy researchers focused on education and broadening participation, and people from industry at a workshop aimed toward framing interactions across gender, race, and ethnicity to advance understanding of gender and ethnicity-related issues in learning through serious game play and game design.

This project advances efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM by producing empirical findings and/or research tools that contribute to knowledge about which models and interventions with K-12 students and teachers are most likely to increase capacity in the STEM and STEM cognate intensive workforce of the future.

The project will develop implement, and test an expansion unit using electronic textiles for the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum that is currently implemented in high schools across the nation by providing an alternative to the existing robotics unit that can appeal and recruit larger group of girls and address the longstanding lack of women and minorities in computing. Over the last decade, there has been a steady decline in the number of women earning bachelor's degrees in computing, with the percentage decreasing from 27.5% in 2002 to 18.2% in 2012, continuing a trend where in some US states no female high school students took the Advanced Placement in CS exam. With the current push to re-introduce CS education into the K-12 schools, there is a great need for carefully developed curriculum materials that introduce high school students to key CS concepts and practices that are also rich and diverse in content that can broaden high school students' perceptions of computing and CS career aspirations coupled together with teacher professional development. The project will mainly take place in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in addition to the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), two of the largest public school districts in the country with high percentages of underserved students. The study also uncovered that high numbers of low-income students of color were offering courses labeled as CS, but their coursework included little other than keyboarding and other basic rudimentary computing skills. Rarely did schools offer rigorous computer science courses, but when they did, they were located in affluent communities and included few girls or students of color. Los Angeles Unified School district (LAUSD) students in ECS reveal high participation rates that closely mirror District demographics. In 2013-14, over 2500 LAUSD students enrolled in ECS; 73% of the students were Latino, 11% African American, 7% Asian, 8% White, and 46% female. There are no other nationwide computer science programs that have attracted such diverse students.

The grant's goals will be (1) to develop robust curricular materials that are accessible to a large group of teachers and students, particularly in underserved communities, (2) to provide evidence that students not only can learn key CS concepts and practices with electronic textiles but also broaden their perspectives of computing and STEM career aspirations, (3) to illustrate an alternative model to competitions for showcasing and disseminating students' final e-textile designs and (4) to pilot teacher professional development. Our interdisciplinary team, versed in addressing issues of equity and diversity in CS, will bring together expertise from curriculum design, computer science, and learning sciences. The CS curriculum will be consisted of six units covering: Human-Computer Interaction, Problem-Solving, Web Design, Introduction to Programming (Scratch), Computing and Data Analysis, and Robotics. The instructional design of the course will adopt inquiry-based teaching practices so that all students are given opportunities to explore, design investigations, think critically, test solutions, and solve real problems. These links to computational thinking will also connect ECS to the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. A key part of ECS will be a professional development (PD) program that builds and supports an on-going teacher learning community. The ECS PD program will spans two years with a combination of two summer week-long institutes and quarterly Saturday workshops. The key features of ECS PD will include: (1) immersion into inquiry and equity-based practices; (2) a focus on teachers' instructional practice done through a teacher-learner-observer model, where teachers take turns planning and delivering lessons in teams with feedback in debrief sessions with fellow teachers; and (3) development of an on-going professional learning. The proposed development of the ECS curriculum and teacher professional development will use electronic textiles with middle and high school students to support their learning of computer science CS concepts and practices and their broadening of perceptions of computing. The project will be leveraged with previous foundational work that developed and piloted introductory and advanced electronic textile activities to introduce CS concepts and practices in line with the existing ECS curriculum to promote computational thinking.

The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that will help envision the next generation of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Epidemics (whether measles, ebola, or the flu) affect youth, but many of the concepts related to how epidemics work (and how to prevent them) are hard to convey to young learners. This project explores how and whether technology can help youth ages 10-14 years learn about how disease epidemics spread and how to prevent them by participating in and experiencing a virtual epidemic outbreak in a massive online community. The project will also provide data to epidemiologists to help understand how educating kids might change the course of epidemics.

This project uses prominent features of virtual worlds--persistence, real time, personal representation, and massive numbers of players--to allow tweens to experience and investigate an epidemic outbreak. A virtual epidemic will be 'unleashed' on a widely used online virtual learning space, Whyville, simulating important aspects of disease including movement of people and contact in social networks, incubation periods, exposure and exposure mitigation, and the utility of presymptomatic testing. Using an innovative combination of observational methods and field experiments, this pilot research will provide insights into how we can design such large-scale online activities to promote individual and community inquiry. The research will explore how public health prevention and protection measures are connected to behavioral changes, conceptual understanding of infection, immunity, and associated social issues. Measures will include youth behaviors online in the virtual world (including chat and logfile analysis, use of the virtual 'protective gear' or 'hand washing' features, and engagement with outbreak-related materials online, including live chats with an epidemiologist.)

This project will make synthetic biology activities accessible to high school students and teachers by providing them with an authentic but safe context to learn and broaden their understanding and perspectives of the role of synthetic biology in bioengineering in personal, health, and food production contexts as well as raise their interest in STEM. The design of bioMAKERlab will generate an educational version of an existing professional-grade lab for synthetic biology to promote safe production, accessibility, and affordability for high schools and community colleges interested in integrating such wetlab activities into their curriculum.

Most current efforts to broaden access to maker activities for K-12 students have focused on developing collaborative fabrication workspaces (fablabs) involving 3D printers, laser cutters, and other digital and traditional tools. This project will develop and implement bioMAKERlab, an innovative wetlab starter kit and activities that will enable high school students and teachers to engage in synthetic biology by building genetic circuits that let microorganisms change color, smell, and shape. In synthetic biology, participants make their own DNA--gene by gene--and then grow their designs into real applications by inserting them into microorganisms to develop different traits and characteristics provided by the genes. The project will involve students from a Philadelphia public high school and young people participating in weekend workshops at The Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia-based science museum.

This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education and Human Resources, and Engineering.

This project will develop culturally responsive making and makerspaces with Indigenous communities in Arizona and Utah. The investigators will work in and with these communities to design maker activities utilizing technologies that complement existing cultural practices where the communities are located. This will be done by addressing the following research questions: 1) How does the design of a community makerspace located at a community college on tribal lands differ from the design of a mobile makerspace that travels between tribal communities? What are the affordances and constraints of each model?; 2) How do high-low tech making activities implemented in these two distinct makerspaces support culturally responsive making and STEM learning in American Indian communities?; and 3) How do these new makerspaces and activities impact youth, teacher, and community conceptions of and interest in STEM learning?

By leveraging heritage craft practices, Indigenous technologies, and a mixture of high-low tech tools and materials, this project will expand the range of available maker activities and broaden our definitions of making to encompass craft practices and Indigenous technologies, which are often excluded from the maker literature and makerspaces. Through the design and development of local and mobile makerspace models serving American Indian communities, knowledge of how to design makerspaces that meet community needs and foster STEM learning will be generated. In terms of broader impact, the project will diversify making activities and makerspaces in ways that allow broadened participation in making for underserved American Indian communities. A key project goal is to critically explore making as a democratizing practice that can broaden Indigenous communities' access to and participation in STEM learning. This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering (ENG).

Debugging is pervasive in both computing education and more generally in problem-solving across many disciplines. Project "Debugging by Design" focuses on the development of debugging for engineering electronic textiles as a central computational thinking practice by putting engineering into high school computer science (CS) classrooms. Unlike traditional approaches that teach debugging strategies, the goal of this project is to investigate a new instructional approach called "debugging by design" where the researchers turn the tables by having students and teachers themselves design debugging activities and materials supported by debugging tools. The hypothesis of the approach is that debugging by design will strengthen teachers' and students' learning of computational and engineering thinking while fostering a growth mindset around computational competencies. Electronic textile construction kits include sewable microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators combining computing, crafting, and engineering thus spanning both the physical and the computational. This particular hybrid medium is ideal for a study on the pedagogical value of debugging in fostering computational thinking in engineering. Bugs can exist in either or both of the media at the same time. Debugging such multi-faceted systems lends itself not only to the practice of computational thinking and programming as a technical skill, but it is also invaluable as a developmental skill leading to a growth mindset and the concept of "productive failure". The project is funded by the STEM+Computing program, which seeks to address emerging challenges in computational STEM areas through the applied integration of computational thinking and computing activities within disciplinary STEM teaching and learning in early childhood education through high school (preK-12).

This project includes interconnected research and materials-design components. The instructional materials developed will be integrated into Exploring Computer Science (ECS) classrooms. The research questions that the project aims to answer include how debugging furthers computational thinking, how debugging encourages a growth mindset, how teachers embed project materials into ECS, and what teachers learn from designing debugging activities. Research will be carried out with ECS classrooms in the Los Angeles Unified School District and School District of Philadelphia. Researchers will work with 2 classrooms (35 students each) in each of the first two years and eight classrooms in the third year. Two "Debuggathons" (debugging design activities) will also be conducted in year 2, with both teachers and students jointly participating. The deliverables of the project include (a) debugging tool support that can help teachers and students debug the code and circuit designs in their advanced electronic textiles; (b) designs and implementations of instructional debugging activities that can be created and used by students and their teachers in Exploring Computer Science high school classrooms; and (c) student and teacher data and analysis that provide evidence on how doing and designing debugging activities can further students' computational thinking and foster a growth mindset.

This RAPID was submitted in response to the NSF Dear Colleague letter related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Epidemiologists have long used simulations of epidemics to better understand their complex dynamics. More recently, simulations have been used as a teaching tool for public health prevention and protection measures. Research has shown that through virtual simulations students can better understand the underpinnings of disease spread and social interactions. This project focuses on how virtual epidemics can engage teachers and students (10-14 years old) as participants and epidemiologists to experience and investigate critical aspects of epidemics, including characteristics that highlight vectors of a COVID-19 outbreak. The project will use an online virtual world called Whyville.net with over 8.4 million registered players (ages 8-16; average age 13; 78% female) which is free of charge and commercial advertisements. In the Whyville virtual world the project will launch a virtual epidemic called WhyCough. WhyCough will provide students opportunities to learn about epidemic outbreaks through immersion. Immersion in the virtual world includes experiencing outbreaks, engaging in prevention, and promoting social action and collecting data about outbreak, using simulators in a virtual CDC, and writing about experiences. Students and teachers will have access to supplemental materials for online discussions and activities. The project activities will provide teachers and students with opportunities for learning about infection, prevention, immunity and social interactions. Additionally, participants will learn about societal reactions to perceived health risks in order to promote a better understanding of infectious diseases on individual and community levels.

The goal of the project is to offer a novel approach to learning about infectious disease, utilizing prominent features of virtual worlds that include; persistence, real time, and personal representation. The virtual world offers massive numbers of players allowing students to experience and investigate a virtual epidemic outbreak. The project will recruit at least 50 teachers and 1,500 students. Using a combination of survey and observational methods, the research will provide further insights into the design of large-scale online activities that promote a better understanding of epidemic outbreaks and issues related to individual reactions to those outbreaks. The research questions include:
1. What attributes of virtual virus design and associated activities do students find most engaging? 2. What do teachers find valuable about the virtual epidemic experience for student learning and engagement? What activities and innovations do they implement in their classrooms? 3. What kinds of connections do youth make from their experiences of a virtual epidemic to real life? The project will make data sets from the study accessible to other researchers and designers interested in understanding patterns of participation in massive communities. Activities proposed for virtual epidemics in Whyville will be available for adoption by other virtual worlds and networked games. The project will communicate results via multiple channels across a wide range of disciplines and audiences, including researchers, practitioners, and the general public.

This project is funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program, which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers.

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.

The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oregon, and the Education Development Center (EDC) will partner with the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) teacher community to help keep experienced high school ECS teachers engaged in the teaching profession. In the last 10 years, ECS has provided initial preparation to thousands of teachers new to teaching computer science (CS) with a focus on improving access and participation to CS for students from underserved communities. Little is known about what this new and growing population of experienced high school teachers needs to continue to grow and succeed in the teaching profession?knowledge critical for retaining and expanding CS teaching force in coming years. The project team will partner with experienced ECS facilitators and teachers to develop an online professional development program to train CS teachers in physical computing along with pedagogy skills that addresses equity into CS teaching. The newly developed, online professional develop program will then be delivered to interested ECS teachers over the course of two years. Outcomes from this work will be analyzed and case studies capturing teacher and facilitator experiences will be developed.

This collaborative project between The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Oregon, and The Education Development Center (EDC) seeks to engage the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) teacher community to determine what experienced high school ECS teachers need to continue to grow and stay engaged in the teaching profession. The PIs propose to partner with a core group of experienced ECS teachers to develop a fully online and time efficient PD model that can handle the challenges of preparing teachers in physical computing while providing a supportive context for discussing equity issues. They will leverage the newly released ECS curriculum unit on electronic textiles (e-textiles), which situates computational thinking within designing functional circuitry in hands-on, personalized crafts, to develop ECS PD. The project team is versed in addressing issues of equity and diversity in CS, and it brings together expertise in teacher learning, computer science education, online instructional design, and learning sciences. This RPP addresses the critical goals for CS education: (1) identify needs of experienced ECS teachers for continued learning and engagement with CS; (2) create and pilot online PD and facilitation for physical computing with e-textiles; (3) examine how online facilitation can expand ECS teachers? pedagogical capacities for addressing in equitable ways students? CS interests and perspectives; (4) build and scale facilitator capacities within the ECS community; and (5) contribute to knowledge on how professional teacher communities can support CS pedagogical practices.

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.