| NSF Org: |
DRL Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1543040 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Wu He
wuhe@nsf.gov (703)292-7593 DRL Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,999,695.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,999,695.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
5717 CORBETT HALL ORONO ME US 04469-5717 (207)581-1484 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
5708 Barrows Orono ME US 04469-5708 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | ITEST-Inov Tech Exp Stu & Teac |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by developing and studying an educational intervention for rural youth to engage with computer science and math concepts through a popular videogame. This project uses the software environment Minecraft, which has already attracted over 100 million users, as a platform for teaching middle schoolers about math and computing concepts. Curriculum and assessment 'badges' will be developed to motivate and teach youth. Research will study how implementing the curriculum in in-school settings, and in afterschool settings through 4-H, influences youngsters' knowledge of math and programming, their attitudes and inclination to STEM careers, and their standardized test scores.
This project proposes to use LearnToMod for Minecraft to engage rural middle school learners (5th to 8th grades) in programming, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving skills. LearnToMod will be piloted with approximately 80 4-H Extension participants and 80 in-school participants, and then a larger implementation will be launched to involve a total of approximately 1000 students in urban and rural areas through five more iterations of curricular refinement. Outcomes will be examined using case studies, participation logs, teacher and student surveys, the badges and embedded assessments developed by the project, and standardized test data from the Maine Department of Education's State Longitudinal Data System. The project will use multi-level mixture modeling to identify specific school characteristics that are associated with different usage and engagement patterns by both students and teachers. Similar analyses will use school-level variables and characteristics, such as poverty, access to resources, existing STEM programs/activities, etc., as predictors of implementation and change in reported teacher attitudes and behavior, such as incorporation of computer science into STEM areas. These analyses will focus on the cross-level interaction/moderator relationships between behaviors of participating students and teachers and school-level characteristics or demographics (e.g., what types of computer programming activities or skills are associated with the greatest change specifically in low-versus-high income schools?).The partnership consists of education and computer science researchers at the University of Maine, the nonprofit ThoughtSTEM, UMaine Cooperative Extension (4-H), the Network Maine state cyberinfrastructure project and the Maine Department of Education's Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), plus K-12 partners. K-12 partners include the Western Foothills Regional School Unit, Eastern Maine AOS, Bangor School Department, Southern Maine SAD Cumberland and North Yarmouth, and the Maine Virtual Academy. Formal evaluation will be conducted by TERC, an independent research organization.
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project utilized supercomputing and cloud resources at the University of Maine as well as one-to-one technology in the classroom to deliver programming experiences for in-class and after school activities. The programming platform was the video game "MineCraft" utilizing the significant programming resources developed by our partner ThoughtStem, a San Diego-based startup company. The game MineCraft was used as a virtual world that students could affect through the programs that they wrote, known as "mods". Curricula were developed and distributed that addressed age-appropriate math and science. Participation ranged from K-8 with the bulk of participants at the middle school level (grades 6, 7, and 8). Most after-school facilitators, teachers, and students developed skills in computer science and computational thinking. Undergraduates that participated in the project went on to study engineering and computer science including the subdomain of cybersecurity. A graduate student participating in the project obtained a teaching position directly attributable to participating in the project. Significantly, the biggest challenges (apart from the global pandemic) were not technical, but human. Several challenges were overcome. The first is students having more familiarity with the game Minecraft than the teachers. Although this was initially problematic, participating teachers came to accept this. The second is the reluctance of local (school) IT staff to accommodate the needs of this project by installing the required software (provided at no cost) and/or allowing the necessary network access. Interestingly, this difficulty led to the most significant technical outcome of the project, namely the development of what was dubbed MCRemote. This is an architecture utilizing a local cloud, that can spin up a web-accessible virtual machine on demand that can be accessed and controlled through a web browser. The virtual machine would deliver the Minecraft environment for the particular student. That is, each student's environment was unique, but only was instantiated on-demand (typically much less than 1% of the time). The student's technology was used (through a web browser) as a keyboard, mouse, and display, for the virtual machine running at the University of Maine. Despite having hundreds of unique machines keyed to individual students, the overall compute load was very low. The number of after-school participants far exceeded the number of in-class participants, indicating a reluctance of teachers to re-work curricula simply because of new technology. Because the program was predominantly after-school, students were predominantly self-selected. The program did not show an increase in interest in STEM careers (we believe because students who chose the after school programs were already interested in STEM careers), nor did it show an increased interest by girls relative to boys. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 virtually halted all participation in the program.
Last Modified: 05/21/2021
Modified by: Bruce E Segee
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