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1. Establishing a Research Experience for Teachers Site to Enhance Data Analytics Curriculum in Secondary STEM Education

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2-1153-38350  

   Zhang, S. ; Specking, E. ; Alimohammadi, M. ; Boykin, A. ; Bell, S. ; Schubert, K. ; Davis, S. ( September 2021 , Proceedings of the ASEE Midwest Section Conference 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper introduces the background and establishment of the first Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Site in Arkansas, supported by the National Science Foundation. The Arkansas Data Analytics Teacher Alliance (AR-DATA) program partners with school districts in the Northwest Arkansas region to promote research-driven high school analytics curriculum and education to reach underserved students, such as those from rural areas. At least thirty 9th-12th grade mathematics, computer science, and pre-engineering teachers will participate in AR-DATA and work with faculty mentors, graduate students, curriculum coaches, and industry experts in a six-week RET Summer Program and academic-year follow up to develop and disseminate learning modules to enhance current curriculum, attain new knowledge of data analytics and engineering applications, and benefit professionally through the RET program activities. The learning modules developed will reflect current cutting-edge analytics research, as well as the development needs of next-generation analytics workforce. 

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2. A Socially Relevant Focused AI Curriculum Designed for Female High School Students

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21546  

   Alvarez, Lauren ; Gransbury, Isabella ; Cateté, Veronica ; Barnes, Tiffany ; Ledéczi, Ákos ; Grover, Shuchi ( June 2022 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Historically, female students have shown low interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula have failed to address the lack of female-centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life applications. Our new summer camp curriculum introduces the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and other real-world subjects to engage high school girls in computing by connecting lessons to relevant and cutting edge technologies. Topics range from social media bots, sentiment of natural language in different media, and the role of AI in criminal justice, and focus on programming activities in the NetsBlox and Python programming languages. Summer camp teachers were prepared in a week-long pedagogy and peer-teaching centered professional development program where they concurrently learned and practiced teaching the curriculum to one another. Then, pairs of teachers led students in learning through hands-on AI and ML activities in a half-day, two-week summer camp. In this paper, we discuss the curriculum development and implementation, as well as survey feedback from both teachers and students. 

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3. Biologically Inspired Design For Engineering Education: Online Teacher Professional Learning (Evaluation)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36749  

   Alemdar, Meltem ; Ehsan, Hoda ; Cappelli, Christopher ; Kim, Euisun ; Moore, Roxanne ; Helms, Michael ; Rosen, Jeffrey ; Weissburg, Marc ( July 2021 , American Society of Engineering education)

   Biologically inspired design has become increasingly common in graduate and undergraduate engineering programs, consistent with an expanding emphasis by professional engineering societies on cross-disciplinary critical thinking skills and adaptive and sustainable design. However, bio-inspired engineering is less common in K-12 education. In 2019, the NSF funded a K-12 project entitled Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE), to create socially relevant, accessible, and highly contextualized high school engineering curricula focusing on bio-inspired design. Studies have shown that women and underrepresented minorities are drawn to curricula, courses, and instructional strategies that are integrated, emphasize systems thinking, and facilitate connection building across courses or disciplines. The BIRDEE project also seeks to interest high school girls in engineering by providing curricula that incorporate humanistic, bio-inspired engineering with a focus on sustainable and authentic design contexts. BIRDEE curricula integrate bio-inspired design into the engineering design process by leveraging design tools that facilitate the application of biological concepts to design challenges. This provides a conceptual framework enabling students to systematically define a design problem, resulting in better, more well-rounded problem specifications. The professional development (PD) for the participating teachers include six-week-long summer internships in university research laboratories focused on biology and bio-inspired design. The goal of these internships is to improve engineering teachers’ knowledge of bio-inspired design by partnering with cutting-edge engineers and scientists to study animal features and behaviors and their applications to engineering design. However, due to COVID-19 and research lab closures in the summer of 2020, the research team had to transfer the summer PD experience to an online setting. An asynchronous, quasi-facilitated online course was developed and delivered to teachers over six weeks. In this paper, we will discuss online pedagogical approaches to experiential learning, teaching bio-inspired design concepts, and the integration of these approaches in the engineering design process. Central to the online PD design and function of each course was the use of inquiry, experiential and highly-collaborative learning strategies. Preliminary results show that teachers appreciated the aspects of the summer PD that included exploration, such as during the “Found Object” activity, and the process of building a prototype. These activities represented experiential learning opportunities where teachers were able to learn by doing. It was noted throughout the focus group discussions that such opportunities were appreciated by participating teachers. Teachers indicated that the experiential learning components of the PD allowed them to do something outside of their comfort zone, inspired them to do research that they would not have done outside of this experience, and allowed them to “be in the student's seat and get hands-on application”. By participating in these experiential learning opportunities, teachers were also able to better understand how the BIRDEE curriculum may impact students’ learning in their classrooms 

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4. Supporting Teacher Professional Learning and Curriculum Implementation Through Collaborative Curriculum Design

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499118  

   Ni, Lijun ; Bausch, Gillian ; Feliciano, Bernardo ; Hsu, Hsien-Yuan ; Martin, Fred ( March 2022 , SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   This poster shares our experience of engaging middle school teachers in a collaborative design of a computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum through a researcher and practitioner partnership (RPP) among two public universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA. The project used the co-design approach to facilitate curriculum development and foster professional learning. In this poster, we introduce the co-design process, the developed curriculum, and teachers' professional learning experiences. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-one-on coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for CS education. 

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5. Preparing teachers to teach artificial intelligence in classrooms: An exploratory study.

   Zhang, H. ; Lee, I. ; Moore, K. S. ( June 2023 , Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2023)

   The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) necessitates educating all students about AI. This, however, poses great challenges because most K-12 teachers have limited prior knowledge or experience of teaching AI. This exploratory study reports the design of an online professional development program aimed at preparing teachers for teaching AI in classrooms. The program includes a book club where teachers read a book about AI and learned key activities of an AI curriculum developed for middle schoolers, and a 2-week practicum where teachers co-taught the curriculum in a summer camp. The participants were 17 teachers from three school districts across the United States. Analysis of their surveys revealed an increase in teachers’ content knowledge and self-efficacy in teaching AI. Teachers reported that the book club taught them AI concepts and the practicum sharpened their teaching practices. Our findings reveal valuable insights on teacher training for the AI education field. 

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