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The home environment is a critical context in which children engage in STEM activities. Caregivers serve as key influencers on their children’s engagement in these activities. This case study of four families explored how caregivers support their child(ren) during moments of problem-solving while completing engineering activities at home and illustrated the variation in caregiver support, caregiver participation/child agency, problem-solving strategies used, and integration of activities into the home. Our findings suggest we need to be purposeful in designing kit activities and supports for caregivers that will contribute to meaningful interactions during STEM activities that draw upon the unique relationship between caregivers and their children in the home. 

Based on the widely recognized situated nature of identity and youth as social producers and products, this qualitative case study reports findings from a week-long informal pet-sciences workshop for middle schoolers who have existing relationships with pets or a strong interest in future pet companionship. Mindful of the structure-agency dialectic, we analyze youth’s wayfaring and trajectories of identification as they learn about their pets at the workshop, accounting for how youth see themselves and their pets and are seen by others. In contrast to a commonly assumed analytic directionality seeing people as moving towards or away from STEM, we find that there were different ways for youth to meaningfully engage themselves in learning about their pets at the workshop. We conclude that attention to fluidity in youth’s identifications can inform us, the adults in the community, of the need to affirm the many possible trajectories that youth may follow. 

Making engages young people with the material world and reflection-in-action, creating promising science learning contexts. Emphasizing relational and social dimensions of making, we conducted a week-long workshop for middle schoolers who are current and aspiring pet companions. Supporting participants’ inquiry into pets’ senses and related behaviors, we asked them to work on maker projects meant to improve their pets’ lives. Following a qualitative analysis of participants’ positioning in relation to their pets, we present case studies of two female participants’ positioning. We find that through the process of making, the two participants demonstrated an increased awareness of pets’ biology and related behavior and their personal interests in pet care, while also differing in what aspects of human-pet relations they focused on. We conclude that through making, especially in contexts with a robust relational draw, youth become attentive to complex and otherwise difficult-to-notice transactions central to taking care of pets. 

We explored how Natural Language Processing (NLP) adaptive dialogs that are designed following Knowledge Integration (KI) pedagogy elicit rich student ideas about thermodynamics and contribute to productive revision. We analyzed how 619 6-8th graders interacted with two rounds of adaptive dialog on an end-of-year inventory. The adaptive dialog significantly improved students’ KI levels. Their revised explanations are more integrated across all grades, genders, and prior thermodynamics experiences. The dialog elicited many additional ideas, including normative ideas and vague reasoning. In the first round, students refined their explanation to focus on their normative ideas. In the second round they began to elaborate their reasoning and add new normative ideas. Students added more mechanistic ideas about conductivity, equilibrium, and the distinction between how an object feels and its temperature after the dialog. Thus, adaptive dialogs are a promising tool for scaffolding science sense-making. 

Developing assessment tools for computational thinking (CT) in STEM education is a precursor for science teachers to effectively integrate intervention strategies for CT practices. One problem to assessing CT skills is students’ varying familiarity with different programming languages and platforms. A text-neutral, open-source platform called iFlow, is capable of addressing this issue. Specifically, this innovative technology has been adopted to elicit underrepresented undergraduate students’ debugging skills. We present how the visual-based coding platform can be applied to bypass programming language bias in assessing CT. In this preliminary study, we discuss design principles of a visual-based platform to effectively assess debugging practices – identification, isolation, and iteration – with the use of iFlow assignments. Our findings suggest how the ability of iFlow to test parts of a program independently, dataflow connectivity, and equity in removing biases from students’ various backgrounds are advantageous over text-based platforms. 

Public critiques of technologies and the algorithms that power them have pushed designers to critically consider for whom they design and who they include in design processes. In education, similar critiques highlight how computational technologies designed for novice learners commonly privilege certain ways of knowing and being. In response, this poster explores how the cultural construct of time is represented across computational platforms for novices and what this means, particularly for Indigenous learners and designers. 

Broadening participation in computing requires a deeper understanding of how to support girls of color in developing computing identities, or views of themselves as active participants within computing. We propose the concept of authentic invitations as a promising avenue for supporting girls of color in developing computing identities. To illustrate the three proposed dimensions of an authentic invitation, we highlight the experiences of Deandra, a 16- year-old Black girl who participated in an informal computing program for girls of color hosted in public libraries. Our findings show how offering voluntary, contextual, and responsive invitations to participate in computing can support girls of color in authoring computing identities that integrate their social and personal experiences.