NSF Awards: 1501451
iCREAT project introduces students, from underrepresented groups in STEM, to Coding, Robotics, Electronics, and Technology to motivate them to pursue STEM fields of study and career.
iCREAT is a NSF-funded project. At the core of this project are two 3-credit multi-disciplinary project-based college courses, where students learn to apply engineering and programming concepts to create an autonomous robot or a telepresence. Each course emphasizes design of a project that has social justice in mind. Courses are taught using active learning and just-in-time instruction methods and small group discussions and team collaboration facilitate the development of critical and creative thinking, logical reasoning, and communication skills.
What makes the iCREAT program unique, is the integration of mentors and career counselors from our partners at Boston College and MentorNet. Students can connect with a mentor working in STEM field and receive career exploration and guidance from expert researchers as well as mentors.
During the summer, these college courses are taught for high school juniors, seniors and just-graduated seniors and during the Fall/Spring semesters, MassBay college students can take these courses.
Recruitment for summer courses targets high school students who are underrepresented in STEM professions: minorities, women, and the first-in-family to go to college. We have a strong relationship with area high schools, where our liaisons identify and encourage underrepresented student to attend these courses.
In this video, the students invite us to view their work and tell us, in their own words, about their learning experiences in the courses. The essential and important parts of the projects are also presented by the Co-PIs.
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Welcome and thank you for viewing our video.
We are a group of faculty from the computer science and engineering departments at Massachusetts Bay Community College who have created 2 interdisciplinary STEM courses. The courses are offered to high school juniors and seniors during the summer and to the community college students during the academic year. Through the coursework students are holistically introduced to coding, robotics, electronics, and technology and how those disciplines interact in the “real world”; while acclimating the students to the college environment. In addition, high school students receive one-on-one mentoring and career exploration guidance and support.
Our video shows students sharing their thoughts on the course and we are happy to share some of our course materials with you including course schedule and a sample lab for each course.
Please share your thoughts, comments and questions with us.
For the STEM teachers, we would love to know if this curriculum could be integrated at your school.
From researchers and practitioners, we would love to hear about your experiences with offering mentoring opportunities to high school students.
Daniel Damelin
Senior Scientist
The mix of 3D printing, robotics, and coding seems highly engaging. How are the students grouped together for these projects? Do they develop specific expertise in one of these areas? What does the collaboration look like?
Giuseppe Sena
Associate Professor/Co-Pi
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for asking. We provide students with opportunities to get to know each other early on through networking activities. At the start of the course we encourage students to work on labs together and change partners for every lab/activity to help them understand who they might want to work with on the project. We try to have students select their teams early on. Otherwise we help create the teams. They all developed a level of expertise in all areas covered in the course.
Ashley Azar
I think it is a great idea, students working together and exchanging thoughts.
Ashley Azar
it is a great idea. Interaction of students and working together .
Marina Bograd
Associate Professor
Thank you Ashley! We really enjoy watching student interaction and see students learn the all important "soft skills" through group work. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the course students also get to understand which STEM area might be of more interest to them.
Susanne Steiger-escobar
Professor
Hi Ashley,
Yes, students work in teams and must collaborate to design and build the final project. Finding time to meet and organizing their schedule is a learning process. They design, built, and troubleshoot collaboratively. In the process they must learn to manage their time and communicate efficiently in order to meet the tasks on schedule. In addition, their project must be documented and presented at the end of the term in a college-wide exhibition. They must distribute the load so that they can complete the tasks. We guide them in the process but allow them to make the final decisions.
Debora Liberi
There are many great features of this program. I feel that mentoring is always a big plus and I appreciate your target population. How many students have been through this program? Do you see these students willing to take other STEM courses as a result? The strength of this video is hearing the students articulate what they are learning.
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Hello Debora,
We collaborate with a virtual mentoring organization - MentorNET. Mentors are pre-selected based on their STEM area of expertise and how closely it matches the course content. Students and mentors are paired based on the profile that each completes. The student-mentor pair communicate on the regular basis by text and Zoom during the course. Students can choose to continue the mentorship after the course is over. To assist with communication, mentors are provided with relevant prompts and course outline to help them relate the conversation to the content of the course.
We have had 48 students during the past two years and will have another 24 this summer. A few of students have already started in STEM fields in our college. Communications with alums are under way to follow up with them with questions such as this.
We are very happy to hear from students who gain confidence about their abilities after taking even the first course!
Kris Morrissey
This looks so fun! And it promotes fabulous thinking and design skills. Nice work!
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Hello Kris,
Yes, it is fun! Students take pride in presenting the prototype of their design and they also learn about system development life cycle.
Claire Duggan
Are you planning to offer professional development for high school teachers to perhaps have them replicate this course model in local schools and/or perhaps share with other CC faculty to expand offerings at CC's across the state and beyond?
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Hello Claire,
Yes, definitely.
This spring we invited high school teachers and college faculty to participate in a train-the-trainer opportunity to encourage them to teach with us next summer or adopt the course at their schools. They were invited to sign up for the course at no cost and take it with our MassBay students. They participated in all the activities including the STEM exhibit of their team project. They were not part of the mentoring. We are hoping to recruit a teacher to help us teach the course during the summer with high school students and/or during the semester with our students.
Claire Duggan
Wonderful - please share in the future when these opportunities arise. I know a number of teachers/CC faculty that might be interested.
Best,
Claire
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Will do.
Carrie Willis
Technology Director and Teacher
I loved hearing from the students, especially the ones who didn't not necessarily have an interest in coding and robotics before the course. I also loved the integration of 3D design and printing into the course. I would love to hear more about the course curriculum and what type of hardware you are using for the course.
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Hello Carrie,
Yes, we are excited to see students both enjoying and learning a lot in both courses.
We purchase large kits online with many miscellaneous electronic components. We then prepare small iCREAT kits with very specific components required for the course.
The kit contains an Arduino microcontroller and some miscellaneous electronic components: car chases, DC motors, servos, sensors, LEDs, etc. (click here for details). Some of the components in this kit are optional (recommended and nice to have) but are not necessary to fulfill the instructional outcomes of this course.
The maximum cost per student if all components from the list are procured would be around $170 per kit (click here for details). However, if all optional components are removed from the kit, the cost could be reduced to around $80 per kit. In addition, to further reduce the cost of running the course for schools would be to buy equipment in bulk from many reputable web stores and get educational discounts.
If you are interested in access to more details about the curriculum and the list of items in the kit, please send me an email at smoussavi@massbay.edu
Jim Hammerman
Co-Director
Hearing students describe their excitement and sometimes surprise about engaging in STEM speaks well for what you're creating. I wonder if you can share about any more systematic evidence you've collected about the impact of this program on students' knowledge, engagement, STEM identity, or other hoped for outcomes. What differences, if any, do you see in the impact of the program with different audiences (high school v community college)?
Marina Bograd
Associate Professor
Hi Jim,
Great questions! We are in our final year of this project. Data has been collected by our research team through the life of the project, but the final analysis will take place at the end of this summer.
James Diamond
Research Scientist
Thanks for sharing this! What a fascinating project, and the students seem so engaged.
Do you provide opportunities for the youth to critique one another's designs, or give one one another any type of structured feedback. This work seems to fit so squarely in a constructionist framework and I'd love to know more about how they're learning to talk about their work with and give feedback to each other. Thanks again!
shamsi moussavi
Professor
Hello James,
Starting at the beginning of the semester we briefly discuss the project and project requirements and constraints on a weekly basis always trying to tie what students are learning this week to the project.
Around mid-semester, we hold formal “peer reviews”. For the peer review, each student team is tasked to create a prototype of their design using available components and making additional things out of cardboard. With their prototype in hand, teams describe what they are planning to build and how it will function. The rest of the class and instructors provide feedback. After the peer review process, students revise their design based on feedback and work on designing, building, and programming the project.
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.