Summary: Over a two-year period, this project will offer 70 middle and high school youths more than 135 contact hours of activities in information technology (IT) and science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Demographically, the project will select participants who are 70% minority, 70% low income, and 50% female. Three interlinked ?studios? will support the workplan. The studios include the Studio@Museum located in the heart of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that will provide space for engaging in and displaying hands-on activities and the Studio@Timble Technical High School that will donate staff support and space for after school activities. The Studio@Neighborhood will create mobile sets of IT experiences based on work completed at the other two studios. The various audiences for this project will be youths, parents, and out-of-school-time providers. Summer and academic year activities are included in the workplan.
Intellectual Merit: The project has a well-defined workplan that includes activities for IT and STEM. The curriculum is organized into sets of instructions and explorations called Cycles of IT Instruction. This approach encompasses overarching concepts with specific engagements, case studies, and other related activities that will allow youths to deeply explore existing and emerging IT and STEM phenomena. Youths will have access to digital cameras and sound automata sensors that they will use along with Cricket basics and PICOblocks programming to develop chain reactions and interactive displays for parents and other visitors to the museum, festivals, and workshops. Other activities will involve youths in distributed computing through communicating among Crickets, applying IT to biological interpretations, preparing informal demonstrations, logging and sharing data (microcontrollers and data collectors and loggers), and exploring how live animals may be used to form the basis of a technology study. The PI has the experience and assembled institutions with the capacity to launch, implement, and sustain this project. They will use lessons-learned from prior NSF funding to move youths beyond knowing specific language in IT and STEM to greater fluency about fundamental concepts underlying these fields, designing original work, imaging new possibilities, planning and executing ideas, and using technology to help the community.
Broader Impacts: The project will greatly advance IT and STEM activities for underrepresented youths in the Forth Worth area. Family festivals, quarterly check-up calls, family memberships to the museum, and bi-annual meetings have all been included in the workplan to address parental involvement in the project. The roles and responsibilities of key partners (Boys Club, Chamber of Commerce, Fort Worth libraries, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Fort Worth Transit Authority, Tarrant County College, and IBM) have been identified for the proposed workplan. For example, Tarrant College will serve as a hotbed for IT based guests to work directly with youths, IBM will provide technology expertise and mentors, while the Transit Authority will provide youths with free passes to and from the museum. Sustainability efforts will include project staff as leaders of ?how to? workshops to help other organizations replicate various aspects of this projects and to develop strategies for creating additional revenue. Dissemination will occur through exhibits at the CommunITy Studio (or CITS), the museum websites, and presentations at tradeshows, festivals, and conferences. Partners have agreed to participate in dissemination efforts through their respective websites and media outlets. The evaluator has extensive experience in evaluating out-of-school activities and will collect relevant data to provide a wealth of information to guide sustainability, dissemination, and future efforts.
