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Although research has touted the value of making in educational settings, scant work has been done in formal school contexts utilizing quantitative methods. This could be attributed to the various challenges in integrating making in school settings. To fill in the gap, this study presents an approach to integrate making into science classes at the 3rd to 5th grade levels in a U.S. public school for four consecutive years (2015–2019). We examined the effect of the program on students’ self-beliefs (self-efficacy, motivation, and self-concept) using a longitudinal quasi-experimental design. We also examined the effect of making on students’ knowledge and skills using state testing data. Results suggest that when averaged across post school year surveys, students in maker classes (vs. control) reported higher self-efficacy beliefs in science and making as well as more interests in STEM-related careers. Moreover, over two school years, we observed that students in the control group experienced declines on some of our variables while our maker students did not. Data thereby speaks to the potential value and promise of integrating making into formal school settings. Practical implications are discussed.

 

Over the past year, our AI4GA team of university faculty and middle school teachers have co-designed a middle school AI curriculum. In this poster we share how we used co-design both as a tool for collaboratively developing engaging AI activities and as a mechanism for mutual professional development. We explain our co-design process, give examples of curriculum materials provided to teachers, and showcase several teacher-created activities. We believe this approach to curriculum development centers the lived experiences of teachers and leverages the knowledge and expertise of university researchers to create high quality and engaging AI learning experiences for K-12 students. 

Physical computing toolkits for children expose young minds to the concepts of computing and electronics within a target activity. To this end, these kits usually make use of a custom Visual Programming Language (or VPL) environment that extends past the functionality of simply programming, often also incorporating representations of electronics aspects in the interface. These representations of the electronics function as a scaffold to help the child focus on programming, instead of having to handle both the programming and details of the electronics at the same time. This paper presents a review of existing physical computing toolkits, looking at the What, How, and Where of electronics representations in their VPL interfaces. We then discuss potential research directions for the design of VPL interfaces for physical computing toolkits for children.