Krystal S. Corbett

STEM Explore, Discover, Apply - Elective courses that use the engineering design process to foster excitement for STEM in middle school students

Engaging students early in meaningful STEM experiences will help them maintain a level of interest in STEM fields later in life. However, the key is developing meaningful courses in STEM for K-12 students. These students not only need to have a “fun” experience, but a meaningful one, where they connect with, and develop deep understanding of the material being presented. STEM Explore, Discover, Apply (STEM EDA) is being created by the Cyber Innovation Center, a 501c not-for-profit as a middle school elective course. STEM EDA is designed as a three course progression through topics that foster excitement for STEM. The curriculum is designed to enhance the core science and math classes taken in middle school. STEM EDA begins by exploring STEM concepts (STEM Explore, 6th grade) then transition to discovering fundamental concepts (STEM Discover, 7th grade), followed by the application of the concepts (STEM Apply, 8th grade). This work in progress will outline the framework for STEM EDA, including the various modules of the courses. Additionally, this paper will discuss how the engineering design process is integrated into the modules, how other disciplines are highlighted, and showcase a specific module in this innovative middle school elective curriculum.

Work in progress — Application of the Boe-Bot in teaching K12 electricity fundamentals

Louisiana Tech University has recently developed a curriculum (NASA-Threads) that integrates engineering, mathematics, and physics. The curriculum, which targets junior and senior high school students, uses hands-on projects that develop student ability to solve realistic multiple-step problems and bring excitement into the classroom. NASA-Threads integrates NASA applications, fundamentals, technology, and communication through hands-on projects that are enabled by an inexpensive micro-controller/robotic platform, the Parallax Boe-Bot. The Boe-Bot provides the enabling technology for projects throughout the course. The course is developed so that a natural progression of fundamental topics is presented. This paper provides clear examples of K12 projects that utilize the Boe-Bot for teaching electricity fundamentals.

An innovative approach to secondary mathematics for Engineering and Science

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for NICERCs Advanced Math for Engineering and Science (AMES) curriculum that will lead to a series of studies on various aspects of the curriculum. Included in the paper is a description of the content, an explanation for the integration of AMES with other curricula, and a description of the professional development for AMES. AMES is a high school curriculum aimed at integrating multiple disciplines in order to provide context for the mathematics concepts used daily by engineers and scientists. This paper begins by discussing the structure of AMES. The structure is based on an analytic geometry approach to concepts taught in high school and post-secondary institutions combined with a multidisciplinary approach providing the context. Additionally, the paper outlines a broad description of the content in AMES and how multiple disciplines such as history, physics, and American government are incorporated into various lessons. This paper then demonstrates how other curricula are interwoven into AMES. Lastly, the paper includes a description of the professional development component of AMES. This section discusses how the professional development engages teachers prior to implementing the course.

Programming design process: Providing K-12 students with a structure to attain programming goals

The Cyber Innovation Centers Cyber Science curriculum is an interdisciplinary approach to educate high school students to become better cyber-citizens. Through Cyber Science, students learn applicable fundamental concepts from political sciences, history, and law as well as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines as they relate to cyber. In particular, the curriculum includes basic programming and structures; advanced computer science topics; and the concepts of security and privacy in relation to cyberspace. The project-driven nature of the curriculum enables students to refine their computational problem-solving abilities through challenging and engaging programming problems. Mirroring the engineering design process, the Cyber Science curriculum introduces an iterative software development process to give students a structured procedure to approach and solve programming problems. This work in progress will address the purpose for developing the Programming Design Process (PDP), define the model used to create the process, and provide an example of a programming problem guided by the PDP.

Work in progress — Using a “cigar box” guitar to teach waves and sound in a high school physics program

NASA-Threads is a full length high school physics program developed by Louisiana Tech University faculty with support from NASA. NASA-Threads is a partnership between K-12 schools and Louisiana Tech University that aims to improve high school student achievement in mathematics and science. This partnership will result in better prepared students entering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs at the university level. Our previous experiences with K-12 program development have shown that long-term impact on students comes through close collaborative relationships between their teachers and university faculty. This paper presents how mathematics and science fundamentals are shown through the construction of a cigar box guitar. Tuning the guitar further develops the physics concepts of sounds, frequency, and waves.

Work in progress — Engineering a context-based college algebra course

An apparent trend in university mathematics courses is that students approach mathematical problems methodically without understanding the context. A large contributor to this trend is the lack of true connections with real applications in most collegelevel algebra courses. For those students pursuing a STEM degree, this disconnect is often perpetuated in later courses in their major. Evidence suggests redesigning College Algebra content to become more context-based could promote a deeper understanding and eliminate the disconnect between fundamentals and applications. Developing the course would involve a structural redesign, creating a different flow of topics while simultaneously relating them to real applications.