We’re excited to announce that our lab has recently been awarded 3 grants from the National Science Foundation! These awards go a long way to fund our research efforts, and a link to each award’s abstract is included if you are interested in learning more. The received awards are as follows:

 

Bridging Formal and Everyday Learning through Wearable Technologies: Towards a Connected Learning Paradigm (link)

This research investigates the use of wearables as a means of capturing students’ everyday experiences in order to reflect on them and draw connections between their everyday experiences and science lessons. We’re targeting 4th through 6th graders in this project, which will contribute to the design of wearable technologies for learning across various contexts and inform frameworks for science education that grounds itself in students’ everyday experiences.

 

Preparing Students for the New Manufacturing Economy: An Integrative Learning Approach (link)

The goal of this project is to help prepare rising students for their careers in an ever-changing world where specializing in just one field will no longer be sufficient. Future work will be multidisciplinary, and thus we will investigate a 2-year Career and Technical Education (CTE) learning experience that exposes students to a range of technology areas, in order to enhance their technological literacy, career preparedness, growth mindset and sense of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) identity. This project is also in collaboration with our colleagues at Texas A&M University.

 

Science Modeling through Physical Computing: Contextualized Computational and Scientific Learning in the Grade 5-6 Classroom (link)

In collaboration with our colleagues at Texas A&M University, this project aims to integrate science learning and the development of computational thinking through the building of physical science models with a scaffolded programming interface. We will deploy these lessons in 5th and 6th grade Texas classrooms to see how they enhance understanding of science concepts, as well as increase efficacy in computing skills.