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1. Is Making all about Tinkering? A Case Study of High School Students’ Activities in Biomaker Workshops

   Lui, D. (January 2019, Connected Learning Summit)

   Most research on K-12 educational making has focused on tinkering with tangible and digital materials and processes within STEM disciplines like computing and engineering. Despite the growing fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology, far fewer studies have explored educational making possibilities in these realms. In this study we explore students’ engagement with biomaking, where people can make new materials and artifacts by genetically manipulating microorganisms. We examined 34 high school students’ experiences and reflections on making biologos by growing color pigments and making biosensors by creating fluorescent reactions. Through observations of workshop interactions and focus group interviews, we found that biomaking primarily engages students with assembly, or step-by-step, processes rather than experimentation or tinkering with materials. In the discussion we address the potentials and affordances of assembly practices in promoting rich learning experiences not just in biomaking, but also in other K-12 maker contexts. 

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2. A Revaluation of How We Think about Making: Examining Assembly Practices and Artifact Imagination in Biomaking

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3311890.3311895  

   Lui, Debora; Kafai, Yasmin B.; Walker, Justice T.; Hanna, Sheri; Hogan, Karen; Telhan, Orkan (January 2019, FabLearn ‘19)

   While much research focused on making emphasizes digital and tangible media, few studies have explored making with biology, or biomaking, where people use cells as fabrication units to grow or “make” desired materials for designing real world applications. This lack is especially glaring considering how biomaking and related industries are often aligned with a growing push toward sustainable production as a way of addressing the pressing environmental issues of the day. In order address how maker frameworks could be used as a productive way of bringing biomaking into K-12 contexts, we report on the design and implementation of a biomaking workshop where teams of high school students both assembled a physical biosensor and imagined applications for this technology to address real world issues. Using classroom observations, analysis of classroom projects, and focus group interviews, we examined student experiences and perceptions of these activities in order to ask: What the affordances and challenges of biomaking in supporting maker learning, especially with regard to the less common practices of assembly and imagining? In the discussion, we review what we learned about facilitating biomaking in K-12 setting, as well how our analysis led us to a revaluation of the often crucial but neglected role assembly plays in more ‘typical’ maker activities, and the possibilities for enriching maker activities by including design prototyping and imagination. 

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3. Workshops and Co-design Can Help Teachers Integrate Computational Thinking into Their K-12 STEM Classes

   Wu, S.; Peel, A.; Bain, C.; Anton, G.; Horn, M.; Wilensky, U. (April 2020, Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Thinking Education 2020)

   Kong, S.C. (Ed.)

   This work aims to help high school STEM teachers integrate computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms by engaging teachers as curriculum co-designers. K-12 teachers who are not trained in computer science may not see the value of CT in STEM classrooms and how to engage their students in computational practices that reflect the practices of STEM professionals. To this end, we developed a 4-week professional development workshop for eight science and mathematics high school teachers to co-design computationally enhanced curriculum with our team of researchers. The workshop first provided an introduction to computational practices and tools for STEM education. Then, teachers engaged in co-design to enhance their science and mathematics curricula with computational practices in STEM. Data from surveys and interviews showed that teachers learned about computational thinking, computational tools, coding, and the value of collaboration after the professional development. Further, they were able to integrate multiple computational tools that engage their students in CT-STEM practices. These findings suggest that teachers can learn to use computational practices and tools through workshops, and that teachers collaborating with researchers in co-design to develop computational enhanced STEM curriculum may be a powerful way to engage students and teachers with CT in K-12 classrooms. 

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4. A balancing act: Elementary teachers and their students balancing tradeoffs in engineering design projects

   Johnson, Matthew M.; Gil, Minyoung (August 2022, ASEE annual conference proceedings)

   This fundamental research in pre-college education engineering study investigates the ways in which elementary school students and their teacher balance the tradeoffs in engineering design. STEM education reforms promote the engagement of K-12 students in the epistemic practices of disciplinary experts to teach content.1,2,3 This emphasis on practices is a paradigm shift that requires both extensive professional development and research to learn about the ways in which students and teacher learn about and participate in these practices. Balancing tradeoffs is an important practice in engineering but most often in classroom curricula it is embedded in the concept of iteration1,4; however, improving a design is not always the same as balancing trade-offs.1 Optimizing a multivariate problem requires students to engage in a number of engineering practices, like considering multiple solution, making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints, applying math and science knowledge to problem solving, constructing models, making evidence-based decisions, and assessing the implications of solutions5. The ways in which teachers and students collectively balance these tradeoffs in a design has been understudied1. Our primary research questions are, “How do teachers and students make decisions about making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints” and “How do experiences in teacher workshops affect the ways they implement engineering projects in their classes.” We take an ethnographic perspective to investigate these phenomena, and collected video data, field notes, student journals, and semi-structured interviews of eight elementary teachers in a workshop and similar data from two of the workshop teachers’ classes as they implemented the curriculum they learned in the workshop. Our analyses focus on the disciplinary practices teachers and students use to make decisions for balancing tradeoffs, how they are supported (or impeded) by teachers, and how they justify these decisions. Similarly, we compared two of the teachers wearing their “student hat” in the workshop as well as their “teacher hat” in the classroom5. Our analyses suggest three significant findings. First, teachers and students tended to focus on one criterion (e.g. cost, performance) and had few discussions about trying to minimize cost and maximize performance. Second, curriculum design significantly impacts the choices students make. Using two examples, we will show the impact of weighting criteria differently on the design strategies teachers and students make. Last, we noted most of the feedback given was related to managing classroom activity rather than supporting students’ designs. Implications of this study are relevant to both engineering educators and engineering curriculum developers. 

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5. “I Understand Their Frustrations a Little Bit Better”: Elementary Teachers’ Affective Stances in Engineering in an Online Learning Program

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--33969  

   Portsmore, Merredith; Watkins, Jessica; Swanson, Rebecca (January 2020, ASEE annual conference)

   As K-12 engineering education becomes more ubiquitous in the U.S, increased attention has been paid to preparing the heterogeneous group of in-service teachers who have taken on the challenge of teaching engineering. Standards have emerged for professional development along with research on teacher learning in engineering that call for teachers to facilitate and support engineering learning environments. Given that many teachers may not have experienced engineering practice calls have been made to engage teaches K-12 teachers in the “doing” of engineering as part of their preparation. However, there is a need for research studying more specific nature of the “doing” and the instructional implications for engaging teachers in “doing” engineering. In general, to date, limited time and constrained resources necessitate that many professional development programs for K-12 teachers to engage participants in the same engineering activities they will enact with their students. While this approach supports teachers’ familiarity with curriculum and ability to anticipate students’ ideas, there is reason to believe that these experiences may not be authentic enough to support teachers in developing a rich understanding of the “doing” of engineering. K-12 teachers are often familiar with the materials and curricular solutions, given their experiences as adults, which means that engaging in the same tasks as their students may not be challenging enough to develop their understandings about engineering. This can then be consequential for their pedagogy: In our prior work, we found that teachers’ linear conceptions of the engineering design process can limit them from recognizing and supporting student engagement in productive design practices. Research on the development of engineering design practices with adults in undergraduate and professional engineering settings has shown significant differences in how adults approach and understand problems. Therefore, we conjectured that engaging teachers in more rigorous engineering challenges designed for adult engineering novices would more readily support their developing rich understandings of the ways in which professional engineers move through the design process. We term this approach meaningful engineering for teachers, and it is informed by work in science education that highlights the importance of learning environments creating a need for learners to develop and engage in disciplinary practices. We explored this approach to teachers’ professional learning experiences in doing engineering in an online graduate program for in-service teachers in engineering education at Tufts University entitled the Teacher Engineering Education Program (teep.tufts.edu). In this exploratory study, we asked: 1. How did teachers respond to engaging in meaningful engineering for teachers in the TEEP program? 2. What did teachers identify as important things they learned about engineering content and pedagogy? This paper focuses on one theme that emerged from teachers’ reflections. Our analysis found that teachers reported that meaningful engineering supported their development of epistemic empathy (“the act of understanding and appreciating someone's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity”) as a result of their own affective experiences in doing engineering that required significant iteration as well as using novel robotic materials. We consider how epistemic empathy may be an important aspect of teacher learning in K-12 engineering education and the potential implications for designing engineering teacher education. 

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