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The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem-based learning, pedagogy for which poses demands on teachers. This paper presents preliminary evidence about how I2M teachers supported student teams to engage in science and engineering practices. 

The purpose of science competitions or science fairs in STEM education is to provide students with opportunities to experience and practice science as it is practiced and experienced in the real world. The Innovate to Mitigate project hosts an annual open innovation challenge for students aged 13-18 to develop methods for mitigating global warming. Over several weeks, students innovate, develop prototype solutions, and engage with peers and with scientists online about their developing ideas. Finally, they submit videos and papers for discussion and judging by a panel of scientists. Submissions over the past few years have included projects over a wide range of domains, for example, energy conservation, renewable energy, agricultural innovations, or social/behavioral change. Framing learning goals for science fairs and science competitions around phenomena that are meaningful to young people offers the opportunity to make direct connections to relevant science and to understand how science is useful in society. We offer suggestions based on what we have learned that provide multiple ways for teachers to begin to support students in learning and effectively using the science practices. Carefully designed competition environments can reveal students as effective problem-solvers, unleash their imaginations, and help them to innovate. 

Abstract This qualitative case study examined how a multimodal professional network environment (STEM for all Video Showcase) affected five STEM educational researchers’ capacity to engage in grant funded research at U.S. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Guided by the social capital and professional network literature as a conceptual framework, we analyzed data from surveys, interviews, and online discussion posts. We aimed to understand HBCU-based researchers’ supports and barriers in writing and/or conducting grant funded research in STEM education, and ways in which the multimodal professional network experience supported their research and professional networking, if at all. We found that organizational structures shaped participants’ social capital as well as their grant funded research activities. Further, participating in a multimodal professional network enabled participants to further develop their research capacity and to also expand their collegial networks. We offer recommendations for institutions to support the research endeavors of their faculty and suggest ways in which organizations using or developing professional multimodal networks can enhance faculty research development. 

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper presents evidence that the web-mediated communities of practice support learning of STEM concepts and practices and provides an account of how student and scientist discourse support that learning. Productive talk deployed by community members elicited greater levels of reasoning than was originally manifest in student work and resulted in improved student products. 

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students. Students are charged with designing feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper draws on data from 3 project teams. The paper presents evidence that a web-mediated community of practice supports STEM learning of concepts and STEM practices and examines conditions under which the environment can enable an account of microgenesis of that learning. 

Multimedia environments provide multiple resources for expression, collaboration, and knowledge-creation. Yet there is much to be learned about the design of such environments, the forms of collegial discourse that take place, and the benefits of participation. To this end, we study the 2017 STEM for All Video Showcase, a multimodal environment, that enabled educational researchers to share and discuss short videos depicting their federally-funded work to improve STEM education. The event (http://stemforall2017.videohall.com), featured 171 video narratives, each accompanied by meta-data, an abstract, and its own discussion. This Showcase, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF #1642187), has been held annually for 4 years and has attracted thousands of researchers and practitioners engaged in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science education. In a mixed methods study, we investigate the forms of participation that took place and the benefits that accrued to those who presented. We provide a thematic analysis of the textual discussions that took place, to further an understanding of the potential of a multimodal environments to facilitate rich collegial exchanges. Finally, the paper describes design decisions and embedded features that promoted different forms of interactivity among participants.