Projects

This project will develop a research-practice partnership to plan and pilot a linguistically and culturally relevant computer science curriculum in middle school with the goal of broadening the participation of emergent bilingual (or English learner) students and Latino/a students in computer science education.

This research project aims to enhance elementary teacher education in science and computational thinking pedagogy through the use of Culturally Relevant Teaching, i.e. teaching in ways that are relevant to students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The project will support 60 elementary teachers in summer professional development and consistent learning opportunities during the school year to learn about and enact culturally relevant computational thinking into their science instruction.

This project offers a two-year professional development model to support a cohort of 16 middle school science teachers of underrepresented students as the teachers gain computational thinking (CT) competencies and design and teach CT-integrated classroom science lessons that will provide students with CT learning experiences. The project will contribute to the understanding of what it takes to empower middle school science teachers as designers of CT learning opportunities for students from underrepresented groups.

This project will investigate how recent advances in artificial intelligence can support computational thinking development within an innovative biology curriculum in which students design and program a robotic arm controlled by their own muscle activity. Specifically, the project will focus on how AI tools can assist students in designing algorithms and translating them into computer programs.

Data science is fast becoming a dominant part of scientific, economic, and social scientific reasoning, as well as a necessary perspective for making life decisions that rely on data. But there is little work in either research or development with students younger than 2nd grade, and even less focusing on children not yet in kindergarten. By expanding knowledge in an emergent content area where young children are currently underserved, this set of three workshops will build capacity to create rigorous, equitable, inclusive, and culturally responsive data science teaching resources, a necessity for school readiness in the early childhood years.

The goal of this project is to develop learning progressions and assessment items targeting computational thinking. The items will be used for a test of college-ready critical reasoning skills and will be integrated into an existing online assessment system, the Berkeley Assessment System Software.

The goal of this project is to develop learning progressions and assessment items targeting computational thinking. The items will be used for a test of college-ready critical reasoning skills and will be integrated into an existing online assessment system, the Berkeley Assessment System Software.

This project addresses a critical need to help middle school teachers learn to incorporate data science in their teaching. It uses an open-source platform called the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) as a tool for teachers to learn about data science and develop resources for students’ learning. The project team will develop a framework for teachers’ knowledge of data science teaching and learning. Insights from the project will help develop effective practices for teaching data science and understanding how students learn data science.

The growing importance of data, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in education, work, and personal and civic life has increased the need for all U.S. students to develop data literacy, statistical reasoning, and computational thinking skills. However, most middle school students—especially those with learning disabilities (SLD)—receive limited or no instruction in these areas. Data science and AI instruction is often limited to high school settings, narrowly framed within mathematics or science, and rarely designed with the flexibility to support learner variability. The purpose of this project is to develop and refine Data Adventures, a series of open-access, modular, and instructional experiences units designed to introduce middle school students to data literacy, computational thinking, and digital storytelling, while also promoting critical understanding of AI and its role in education, work technology, and everyday life.

Transdisciplinary science integrates knowledge across STEM disciplines to research complex challenges such as climate science, genetic engineering, or ecology. In this project, teachers and students will design smart greenhouses by connecting electronic sensors that can detect light or other environmental data to microcontrollers that can activate devices that water plants and regulate other environmental factors such as temperature or light. This activity brings together engineering, computer science, and horticulture. Working across urban and rural contexts, the project will engage teachers in professional development as they adopt and adapt instructional materials to support their students in learning across disciplines as they build smart greenhouses.

Transdisciplinary science integrates knowledge across STEM disciplines to research complex challenges such as climate science, genetic engineering, or ecology. In this project, teachers and students will design smart greenhouses by connecting electronic sensors that can detect light or other environmental data to microcontrollers that can activate devices that water plants and regulate other environmental factors such as temperature or light. This activity brings together engineering, computer science, and horticulture. Working across urban and rural contexts, the project will engage teachers in professional development as they adopt and adapt instructional materials to support their students in learning across disciplines as they build smart greenhouses.

Transdisciplinary science integrates knowledge across STEM disciplines to research complex challenges such as climate science, genetic engineering, or ecology. In this project, teachers and students will design smart greenhouses by connecting electronic sensors that can detect light or other environmental data to microcontrollers that can activate devices that water plants and regulate other environmental factors such as temperature or light. This activity brings together engineering, computer science, and horticulture. Working across urban and rural contexts, the project will engage teachers in professional development as they adopt and adapt instructional materials to support their students in learning across disciplines as they build smart greenhouses.

Rapid changes in computing, especially with advances in artificial intelligence, are reshaping the future needs of society and the demands on the STEM workforce. More than ever, computer science (CS) education is critical for all children. Many schools are looking for ways to introduce CS skills and thinking in the elementary grades. Whereas some initiatives have focused on coding as its own endeavor, not integrated with subjects like mathematics, science, or literacy, developers and researchers are increasingly exploring ways that programming and computational thinking (CT) can be integrated into core content. This project will design and study resources that build teacher capacity to integrate CS/CT into mathematics by building on the investigators' prior work developing integrated Math+CS modules in grades 2-5.

This exploratory project aims to develop a community of individuals and organizations working together to address critical issues in K-12 computer science education by broadening the awareness of the need for curriculum computer science standards, providing multiple levels of professional development, conducting and disseminating research in computer science education, and promoting this subject as a unique field of study in schools.

Environmental issues like wildfires can serve as effective science learning contexts to promote scientific literacy and citizenship. This project will partner with teachers, teacher educators, and disciplinary experts in data science, fire ecology, public health, and environmental communication to co-design a data-driven, justice-oriented, and issue-based unit on wildfires. In the unit, student will engage in various data practices to gain insights into the issue of wildfires and how it affects their lives and communities. The project seeks to theorize how learners can leverage disciplinary knowledge and practices in environmental and data science as a foundation for making data-informed actions towards a more just and sustainable society.

This project will develop a professional development model that allows rural secondary teachers to learn and develop computational thinking related teaching skills with long-term support and scaffolds in place to both build their knowledge and the long-term capacity of their school districts.

This project focuses on fostering equitable and inclusive STEM contexts with attention to documenting and reducing adolescents' experiences of harassment, bias, prejudice and stereotyping. This research will contribute to understanding of the current STEM educational climates in high schools and will help to identify factors that promote resilience in the STEM contexts, documenting how K-12 educators can structure their classrooms and schools to foster success of all students in STEM classes.

This project will study the effect of integrating computing into preservice teacher programs. The project will use design-based research to explore how to connect computing concepts and integration activities to teachers' subject area knowledge and teaching practice, and which computing concepts are most valuable for general computational literacy.

The project at Spelman College includes activities that develop computational thinking and encourage middle school, African-American girls to consider careers in computer science. Over a three-year period, the girls attend summer camp sessions of two weeks where they learn to design interactive games. Experts in Computational Algorithmic Thinking as well as undergraduate, computer science majors at Spelman College guide the middle-school students in their design of games and exploration of related STEM careers.

Computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills for the 21st century. Unfortunately few K-12 schools in the United States offer significant courses that address learning these skills. However many schools do offer robotics courses. These courses can incorporate computational thinking instruction but frequently do not. This research project aims to address this problem by developing a comprehensive set of resources designed to address teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources.

This project builds on prior efforts to create teaching resources for high-school Advanced Placement Statistics teachers to use an open source statistics programming language called "R" in their classrooms. The project brings together datasets from a variety of STEM domains, and will develop exercises and assessments to teach students how to program in R and learn the underlying statistics concepts.

This project aims to engage students in meaningful scientific data collection, analysis, visualization, modeling, and interpretation. It targets grades 9-12 science instruction. The proposed research poses the question "How do learners conceive of and interact with empirical data, particularly when it has a hierarchical structure in which parameters and results are at one level and raw data at another?"

This project will examine the relationships among the factors that influence the implementation of the Exploring Computer Science (ECS), a pre-Advanced Placement curriculum that prepares students for further study in computer science. This study elucidates how variation in curricular implementation influences student learning and determines not only what works, but also for whom and under what circumstances.

This five-year project investigates how to provide continuous assessment and feedback to guide students' understanding during science inquiry-learning experiences, as well as detailed guidance to teachers and administrators through a technology-enhanced system. The assessment system integrates validated automated scorings for students' written responses to open-ended assessment items into the "Web-based Inquiry Science Environment" (WISE) program.

This project will address the need for engineering resources by applying an innovative pedagogy called Imaginative Education (IE) to create middle school engineering curricula. In IE, developmentally appropriate narratives are used to design learning environments that help learners engage with content and organize their knowledge productively. This project will combine IE with transmedia storytelling.