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Early childhood years are critical for developing the foundational knowledge, skills, and attitudes for later success in STEM. Young children learn science best when they actively engage with topics that are meaningful to their everyday lives. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help in developing science learning content and making it more interactive, but inherent social, racial, and linguistic biases in AI-generated...

Semiconductors are fundamental to modern technology, driving advancements in fields such as communication, healthcare, and national security. To maintain global competitiveness in the semiconductor industry, the U.S. must cultivate a skilled and diverse workforce. However, many young individuals, particularly those who are neurodivergent, lack opportunities to engage with the foundational elements of electronics in a hands-on and creative manner. This...

Overnight outdoor education programs are a form of informal learning that emphasize learner choice, hands-on, collaborative experiences and extended opportunities for learners to engage behaviorally, cognitively, and emotionally with real world STEM phenomena outside the classroom. There has been strong evidence that these programs can have positive benefits for learners, including: environmental and science awareness and knowledge; enhanced attitudes toward...

Girls interact with advanced technologies every day, and yet only 20 percent of computer science degrees in the United States are awarded to women. This number has further decreased over the years, and when broken out by ethnicity, is much lower for racially minoritized girls. This issue is not solely due to lack of access, but due to the approaches...

Hands-on technology-rich maker activities that combine computer programming, digital fabrication (e.g., 3D printing), and computer-aided design are shown to support learners' empowerment, social competence, and technical training. However, existing maker activities and maker-spaces are often not designed for learners with autism. This results in missed opportunities for including youth and young adults with autism in empowering and meaningful STEM learning...

Hands-on technology-rich maker activities that combine computer programming, digital fabrication (e.g., 3D printing), and computer-aided design are shown to support learners' empowerment, social competence, and technical training. However, existing maker activities and maker-spaces are often not designed for learners with autism. This results in missed opportunities for including youth and young adults with autism in empowering and meaningful STEM learning...

The current educational framework of K-12 STEM programs needs a major overhaul to introduce students to the extensive range of crucial STEM fields, particularly those facing workforce shortages as identified by the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act. Limited exposure and lack of engagement often diminish interest among younger students and contribute to a serious shortage...

This award, which is this co-funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), program supports a collaborative research project the investigates the development, use, and impact of science multimedia for young children. It utilizes the history of The Magic School Bus (MSB), one of the most successful informal science initiatives of the past forty years, to study the relationship between...

This project addresses the critical need for advanced training in microelectronics physical assurance, inspection, and metrology, a field essential to the integrity and security of electronic components in the global supply chain. With the enactment of the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, the United States is focused on strengthening domestic microelectronics manufacturing. However, there is a...

Urgent socio-ecological challenges, such as extreme droughts, wildfires, and cultural and environmental destruction, draw attention to the interconnectedness of the natural environment and historical injustices in these places, and the need for transformative educational approaches rooted in community engagement and equity. This Partnership Development and Planning project is a collaborative effort between four organizations in California's Sierra Nevada region that...

It is essential to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion by making programs more accessible for individuals with disabilities to broaden the STEM enterprise and create a more inclusive workforce. Despite rising awareness of barriers in STEM for those with disabilities most efforts have centered on physical disabilities, often overlooking neurodiverse learners. To address the issues of neurodiverse learners, this project...

Afterschool programs, science camps, and museums are a great way to engage children with STEM and begin to cultivate their identities as scientists. However, these activities can be costly and difficult to access for certain families, such as those in which English is not their first language. Podcasts, on the other hand, offer a promising, free option for families to...

Many point to the potentially transformative role early engineering education can play in broadening participation in STEM among individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Moreover, this idea has driven the dramatic expansion of tinkering and making spaces and programs that provide engineering learning opportunities for children and their families in the early years. To fully unlock the promise of...

Facilitating Constructive Engineering Talk (FACET) is a collaboration between the University of Nebraska Lincoln 4-H and the Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. The researchers are studying educators' talk within 4-H facilitated engineering design activities. Talk moves are a tool that educators can use to elicit learners' engineering reasoning and sense making, encourage explorative learning, and support productive...

The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), in partnership with the University of Minnesota (UMN) and Bakken Museum, is conducting a Practitioner-Driven Synthesis of Museum Family Learning Conversations (FLC) Research. The project team, which includes researchers, librarians, museum educators, and experience designers, aims to bridge research and practitioner knowledges to produce bidirectional insights for the future of museum design and museum-based...

Many point to the potentially transformative role early engineering education can play in broadening participation in STEM among individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Moreover, this idea has driven the dramatic expansion of tinkering and making spaces and programs that provide engineering learning opportunities for children and their families in the early years. To fully unlock the promise of...

Proportionally, Native Americans earn fewer undergraduate and advanced degrees in science and engineering than any American minoritized group, and they have the fewest doctoral scientists and engineers in the workforce. One contributing factor is the way STEM is typically taught, which can create a disconnect between home and school cultures, and a clash between identities and worldviews. This project proposes...

The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) will undertake a two-year Integrating Research and Practice project that will build the capacity of informal STEM educators to conduct evaluations of family STEM learning programs that are aligned with and responsive to the priorities and interests of program participants. The goal of this project is to test and develop resources that can...

This project seeks to use films that speak directly to anti-racism, science, and environmental justice in ways that support reflection, thoughtful dialogues, behavior change, and approaches to mend and develop relationships between informal STEM learning institutions and local communities of color. In this first phase, a Partnership Development and Planning project, the team will cultivate partnerships between community leaders and...

Personalized healthcare that considers individual differences in genetics, lifestyle, and medical history is more effective than one-size-fits-all solutions. This project utilizes advanced wearable and portable devices with large language models (LLMs) to enhance personalized healthcare by addressing the patient variability often overlooked by current methods. It focuses on real-time healthcare personalization through fast and accurate data searches in ever-growing personal...

Custom, domain-specific hardware accelerators are critical tools for advancing computationally intensive applications in the modern era of computing. While a new generation of accelerator design languages (ADLs) has raised the level of abstraction for designing specialized hardware, architects must also rely on analyses beyond the language itself to optimize performance and identify and fix correctness issues. This project will develop...

Non-technical Description: A major challenge in quantum computing is to maintain the quantum state for a long time (known as long coherence time) and to achieve controllable coupling between quantum bits. This three-year project aims to develop research and education capacities in the emerging field of quantum information science and engineering (QISE) at Hunter College, in close collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic...

This project aims to develop fundamental design principles for molecular qubit quantum sensors. The project team will exploit key quantum features of molecules to enhance the sensitivity and response of both optical and electrical sensors. These fundamental advances in sensor design have potential applications from materials to biology. By leveraging Rowan University's strong connection to the South Jersey area and...

Quantum information science (QIS) is an area of discovery and technology, with implications for national security and overall competitiveness. Yet, there are few ways for future innovators to learn about QIS and consider career pathways prior to college. While there are ongoing efforts to solve this by bringing QIS into the formal classroom, developing the readiness among informal educators offers...

Given the importance of developing a well-equipped United States STEM workforce, the number of STEM postdoctoral researchers has increased more than threefold over the past 40 years. However, inequalities related to power dynamics, race, gender, and the types of training postdoctoral researchers receive persist. While research training and publication have traditionally been the standard for STEM research training programs, these...