This paper describes the design, implementation and research of the Cyber Sleuth Science Lab (CSSL), an innovative educational program and supporting virtual learning environment, that combines pedagogical theory, gender inclusive instruction strategies, scientific principles/practices, gamification methods, computational thinking, and real-world problem solving. This program provides underrepresented youth, especially girls, with digital forensic knowledge, skills and career pathways, challenging them to explore complex social issues related to technology and to become cyber sleuths using real-world digital forensic methods and tools to solve investigative scenarios. Students also learn about related careers while improving their cyber street smarts. The CSSL incorporates additional “outside of the computer” activities to strengthen students’ engagement such as structured in-classroom discussions, mock trials, and in-person interactions with practitioner role models. The CSSL was piloted in various forms to assess the suitability for in-school and out-of-school settings, and the students predominantly represented racial minorities. Research in this project relied on a mixed methods approach for data collection and analysis, including qualitative and quantitative methods, reinforced using learning analytics generated from the students clicking through the interface and interacting with the system. Analysis of gathered data indicate that the virtual learning environment developed in this project is highly effective for teaching digital forensic knowledge, skills, and abilities that are directly applicable in the workplace. Furthermore, the strategies for gender inclusive STEM instruction implemented in CSSL are effective for engaging girls without being harmful to boys’ engagement. Learning STEM through digital forensic science taps into girls’ motivations to address real-world problems that have direct relevance to their lives, and to protect and serve their community. After participating in the educational program, girls expressed a significantly greater increase in interest, relative to boys, in learning more about careers related to digital forensics and cybersecurity.
Aerial Drone: an Effective Tool to Teach Information Technology and Cybersecurity through Project Based Learning to Minority High School Students in the U.S.
This paper describes the design, implementation, and results of an NSF funded Summer Academy from 2016 to 2018, which engaged, on an annual basis, 30 to 60 rising 10th and 11th grade high school science students in an innovative, technology enriched Project Based Learning (PBL) environment. This Academy emphasized how tech gadgets work and the impact that technology can have on improving communities by immersing students in the exploration of one such device that is a growing phenomenon, the “aerial drone.” In this Academy, the students learned various operations of the drone through Python programming
language, and some cybersecurity issues and solutions. The student teams, under the guidance of diverse mentors, comprehensively fortified their STEM problem-solving skills and critical thinking. Both formative and summative evaluations for this Academy showed that it helped students improve their critical thinking ability and motivated them to pursue careers in STEM-related disciplines, specifically in information technology and cybersecurity areas.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10165836
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- TechTrends
- ISSN:
- 8756-3894
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract -
As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement. One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning.more » « less
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null (Ed.)The migration of infrastructure from on premise installation and maintenance of computing resources to cloud based systems by business of all sizes has been an ongoing event for several years. To minimize capital expenses and allow for demand based operational expenses has increased the need for cloud practitioners with the ability to create and control these resources. The demand for skilled cloud workers ranging from developers to architects has been increasing, and one way to increase the technicians available for these job skills is to start recruitment as early as high school. For high school students interested in the technical side of STEM pathways, the ability to understand, design and work in a cloud environment is now part of critical technical skills. Fluency in cloud and cloud environments, the ability to understand the capabilities of all these modern technologies are necessary technical skills. To support this growing demand of cloud skills, the institution partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing solutions, to train high school students as early cloud adopters and to be well-prepared for the computing/IT workforce of tomorrow. This academic-industry partnership aims to raise cloud literacy in K-12 by offering a two-week cloud computing bootcamp for high school students selected from traditionally underrepresented groups, Hispanic and/or African Americans. The bootcamp used a combination of team teaching, online sandbox repetition and experimentation, and project-based practice. The AWS materials provided by AWS Academy covered the details of the AWS infrastructure and were coupled with AWS Educate classroom sandboxes for practice. The two-week intensive practice and review certified 21 out of 31 high school students in the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. This was the first time AWS Academy authorized high school students to take the certification exam and currently the largest cohort of high school students as AWS Cloud Practitioners. This paper presents the details of the pilot implementation of the summer bootcamp part of the cloud literacy initiative. This pilot includes curriculum, pedagogy, and software tools. Surveys were administered to the students to collect their demographic information, assessments of the pedagogical approaches and interest in cloud computing. Also, pre- and post-exam scores were reported to analyze student performance outcomes. These results are presented to show the potential of such an outreach program to build capacity and broaden participation in the computing field through emerging technology.more » « less
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The goal of Project STEMulate, a National Science Foundation ITEST study (DRL 1657625), was to develop, implement, and evaluate a program that fosters success in STEM for underserved and underrepresented high school students. The project was implemented at three sites of the Department of Education Upward Bound Program in Hawaiˋi. Project STEMulate delivered teacher training on Problem-Based Learning curriculum to ensure students were motivated and empowered, and to support STEM- related postsecondary educational success of Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students. A critical design goal of the program was to introduce teaching and learning strategies and processes that were more relevant to underrepresented youth populations than those offered in typical high schools to provide opportunities and to increase participation in the STEM study and career trajectory, something all too often out of mind and scope of these students. This study reports on three years of mixed methods summer academy data on both student and teacher learning outcomes. Teacher dispositions, evidenced through data from interviews, observations, and multi-point surveys improved in a majority of the dimensions, including teaching inquiry-based approaches, integrating technology, and STEM career knowledge and awareness. Student motivation, Science self-efficacy, and STEM career interest, evidenced from similar data sources, increased as well. Finally, we discuss the larger implications of extending this work to impact similar populations elsewhere of isolated, under- resourced and under-exposed youth with these proven strategies.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Access to enriching science programs is not equitable, with students from affluent districts having more opportunities to develop their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills than students from underserved districts. The Building Unique Inventions to Launch Discovery, Engagement, and Reasoning in STEM (BUILDERS) program was started in 2017 with support from the National Science Foundation’s ITEST program to provide students from the Alabama Black Belt with STEM opportunities to which they would otherwise have no access. This project-based learning (PBL) program uses the concept of a makerspace to allow students to explore how science and technology can be used to solve the problems that affect their own communities. During an intensive, 3-week summer experience (the BUILDERS Academy), teams of students enthusiastically use the makerspace to design, build, and test prototypes of technology-based solutions to their community problems. During this immersive PBL process, they acquire and apply STEM concepts, learn about STEM careers, and acquire valuable 21st century skills. An extension of the summer Academy into the academic year was only moderately successful, highlighting the need to make extra-curricular STEM interventions available to underserved students in order to increase equitable access to practical and enriching educational experiences in STEM.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00502-7
