More Like this

1. Everyday STEAM Objects as Integrative Boundary Objects

   Tsurusaki, B. (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. and (Ed.)

   As STEAM has gained traction in informal education settings, it is important to support educators in learning about and developing STEAM learning experiences. We investigated what STEAM means to informal educators and how it relates to their everyday lives and identities by examining a STEAM objects activity. We found three themes in how the participants talked about the significance of the STEAM objects they shared: connection to land, historicity, and agency of materials. The STEAM objects served as boundary objects that connected communities of practice, showing the integrative nature of art and STEM, as well as bridging important aspects of their lives and STEAM. We discuss the importance of recognizing and leveraging the multiplicities of meaning and ways of knowing. 

   more » « less
2. Visual Goal-Step Inference using wikiHow

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.165  

   Yang, Yue; Panagopoulou, Artemis; Lyu, Qing; Zhang, Li; Yatskar, Mark; Callison-Burch, Chris (January 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Understanding what sequence of steps are needed to complete a goal can help artificial intelligence systems reason about human activities. Past work in NLP has examined the task of goal-step inference for text. We introduce the visual analogue. We propose the Visual Goal-Step Inference (VGSI) task, where a model is given a textual goal and must choose which of four images represents a plausible step towards that goal. With a new dataset harvested from wikiHow consisting of 772,277 images representing human actions, we show that our task is challenging for state-of-the-art multimodal models. Moreover, the multimodal representation learned from our data can be effectively transferred to other datasets like HowTo100m, increasing the VGSI accuracy by 15 - 20%. Our task will facilitate multimodal reasoning about procedural events. 

   more » « less
3. STEAM learning in an in-school makerspace: The role of distributed spatial sensemaking.

   Ramey, K. E.; Stevens, R.; Uttal, D. H. (January 2018, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, London, UK)

   This study examines technology-enhanced STEAM learning among fifth and sixth grade students in one set of in-school makerspaces. It focuses on the learning of one set of meta-disciplinary skills, spatial skills. Prior research has shown these skills to be relevant for STEAM achievement, but they have been underemphasized in our schools and in the literature on learning through making. Informed by a distributed cognition perspective and using a combination of qualitative categorical coding and interaction analysis, this study provides a learning sciences approach to studying spatial thinking and learning. Analyses show that during making activities students engaged in frequent and diverse spatial thinking with a variety of social and material resources and that the sociomaterial contexts of different making activities facilitated different types of spatial thinking. They also show that spatial thinking developed over time and led to problem-solving insights. 

   more » « less
4. Exploring the integrative nature of STEAM through material objects

   https://doi.org/10.1080/1554480X.2023.2282980  

   Tsurusaki, Blakely K; Tzou, Carrie; Carsten_Conner, Laura (November 2023, Pedagogies: An International Journal)

   STEAM has gained traction across informal and formal educational settings, but the connections between STEAM disciplines are not always obvious to youth. We argue that an explicit focus on how art and STEM overlap in the world, and how these overlaps connect personally to learner’s interests and concerns, is a way to support the development of STEAM-related identities. We developed a “STEAM objects” pedagogical activity aimed at explicitly surfacing the ways that art and STEM are intertwined in everyday objects, as well as the ways that STEAM is connected to learners’ own lives. We piloted the activity with educators, asking what they took up from the experience. Our results show how the educators made connections to land, historicity, their professions, function, aesthetics, and agency of materials during the activity. The STEAM objects served as boundary objects that illustrated the integrative nature of art and STEM in the world, as well as bridging important aspects of their lives and STEAM. We discuss the importance of recognizing and leveraging the multiplicities of meaning and ways of knowing, as well as implications for the classroom. 

   more » « less
5. STEM Teacher Beliefs about the NASA STELLA Instrument as an Educational Tool for Justice-Centered STEAM Making

   Nichols, L; Corum, K; Taylor, M; Mirel, P (March 2025, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE))

   Hartshorne, R; Cohen, J (Ed.)

   In order to promote justice-centered making in STEAM classrooms, the NASA Landsat-based Science and Technology Education for Land/Life Assessment (STELLA) instrument is proposed as an affordable educational tool for students to collect and analyze data pertaining to vegetation health, surface temperature, and air quality. This instrument can be used to investigate justice-centered, community-based problems and promote civic engagement toward policy change for a healthier world. Our study applies the MakerTPICK theoretical framework to a qualitative study to explore changes in teacher beliefs about the STELLA instrument following three justice-centered STEAM-making activities pertaining to urban heat islands, air quality, and vegetation health. The implications of this research can be used to inform professional development and promote justice-centered learning in the STEAM classroom. 

   more » « less