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1. Impacts of the ProQual Institute: Building communities of technical STEM faculty for long-term engagement in educational research

   Morelock, John R.; May, Dominik; Reid, Aileen; Boyce, Ayesha; Janaki, Chaturved; Sochacka, Nicola W.; Walther, Joachim (June 2023, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   In this paper, we report on the impacts of the ProQual Institute—a $1M award via the NSF ECREHR Core Research program in 2019—as it nears the end of its funding period. The ProQual Institute’s goal is to build national capacity for STEM education research by engaging technical STEM from across the U.S. in cohorts that participate in an 8-week course on qualitative and mixed methods educational research techniques, followed by engagement in several communities of practice to continue supporting participant research projects and building participants’ confidence as educational researchers. This project was funded based on impact rather than knowledge generation; thus, this paper will report on the impacts of the ProQual Institute in terms of participants served and evaluated outcomes and project team observations. The key evaluation questions we answered were: (1) To what extent did the project design and implement a high-quality and culturally responsive training program? (2) What knowledge and skills did participants gain because of participation in the ProQual Institute? (3) How could the ProQual Institute be built upon to improve participant outcomes? 

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2. Introducing Engineering Design to First-Year Students Through the Net Zero Energy Challenge

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0047231X.2024.2380302  

   Sereiviene, Elena; Ding, Xiaotong; Jiang, Rundong; Zheng, Juan; Kashyrskyy, Andriy; Bulseco, Dylan; Xie, Charles (August 2024, Journal of College Science Teaching)

   First-year engineering students are often introduced to the engineering design process through project-based learning situated in a concrete design context. Design contexts like mechanical engineering are commonly used, but students and teachers may need more options. In this article, we show how sustainable building design can serve as an alternative for students of diverse backgrounds and with various interests. The proposed Net Zero Energy Challenge is an engineering design project in which students practice the full engineering design cycle to create a virtual house that generates renewable energy on-site, with the goal to achieve net zero energy consumption. Such a design challenge is made possible by Aladdin, an integrated tool that supports building design, simulation, and analysis within a single package. A pilot study of the Net Zero Energy Challenge at a university in Mid-Atlantic United States suggests that around half of the students were able to achieve the design goal. 

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3. The Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science Partnership Model

   https://doi.org/10.5430/jct.v8n2p1  

   Birney, Lauren; McNamara, Denise; Evans, Brian; Woods, Nancy; Hill, Jonathan (March 2019, Journal of Curriculum and Teaching)

   This paper identifies the complex interactions of a multi-member partnership and outlines the synergetic opportunitiesand challenges within the model. At the core of the partnership model is the restoration of the waterways surroundingNew York City through the reestablishment of the oyster into New York Harbor. The overarching goal was to connectmembers of the community to their environment to increase social awareness and responsibility. Stewardship of theharbor through involvement of education, business, and private sectors increased the citizen science involvement of thecommunity. The key to the success of this partnership model is the overlapping of roles and responsibilities as well asa strong “connector” serving to mediate the interactions among the stakeholders and enable the success of thepartnership. The partnerships were dynamic and evolving blurring lines and responsibilities. Serendipitous outcomesenhanced partnership relationships and in turn, the efficacy of the project. 

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4. The CyberAmbassador Training Program

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   Briliyanti, Astri; Rojewski, Julie; Van Nguyen, T. J.; Luchini-Colbry, Katy; Colbry, Dirk (January 2019, PEARC ’19: Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on the Rise of the Machines (learning))

   null (Ed.)

   The CyberAmbassador project aims to provide professional skills training for Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) professionals, with the goal of developing "CyberAmbassadors" [16] who are prepared to facilitate and lead multidisciplinary, computationally-intensive research. This NSF funded program (Award Number 1730137) has the following objectives: (1) Develop curriculum that focuses on professional skills (communications, teamwork, leadership) within the context of large scale, multidisciplinary computational research; (2) Pilot, evaluate and revise the curriculum; (3) Develop "Train the Trainers" workshops to broaden the impact of the curriculum and connect with external partners to ensure the longevity of the program beyond the timeframe of the grant. This paper introduces the core curriculum, describes different modes of delivering content that we have piloted, shares preliminary evaluation results from two particularly relevant cases, and offers initial lessons learned. 

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5. MetPy: A Meteorological Python Library for Data Analysis and Visualization

   https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0125.1  

   May, Ryan M.; Goebbert, Kevin H.; Thielen, Jonathan E.; Leeman, John R.; Camron, M. Drew; Bruick, Zachary; Bruning, Eric C.; Manser, Russell P.; Arms, Sean C.; Marsh, Patrick T. (October 2022, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society)

   Abstract MetPy is an open-source, Python-based package for meteorology, providing domain-specific functionality built extensively on top of the robust scientific Python software stack, which includes libraries like NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and xarray. The goal of the project is to bring the weather analysis capabilities of GEMPAK (and similar software tools) into a modern computing paradigm. MetPy strives to employ best practices in its development, including software tests, continuous integration, and automated publishing of web-based documentation. As such, MetPy represents a sustainable, long-term project that fills a need for the meteorological community. MetPy’s development is substantially driven by its user community, both through feedback on a variety of open, public forums like Stack Overflow, and through code contributions facilitated by the GitHub collaborative software development platform. MetPy has recently seen the release of version 1.0, with robust functionality for analyzing and visualizing meteorological datasets. While previous versions of MetPy have already seen extensive use, the 1.0 release represents a significant milestone in terms of completeness and a commitment to long-term support for the programming interfaces. This article provides an overview of MetPy’s suite of capabilities, including its use of labeled arrays and physical unit information as its core data model, unit-aware calculations, cross sections, skew T and GEMPAK-like plotting, station model plots, and support for parsing a variety of meteorological data formats. The general road map for future planned development for MetPy is also discussed. 

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