Because of the quick pivot to a remote offering, our focus was on translating the high quality STEM camp into an enjoyable virtual educational experience. Students provided information about their knowledge of STEM before and after the virtual Summer Institute.  They also responded to surveys at the end of each educational module to track their learning.  At the end of the camp, students were asked to reflect on their experience and to offer feedback on recommended improvements.  From these responses,  we saw comments by 54% of the students similar to “I personally liked learning the coding processes that went into coding the micro:bit. Learning the code and seeing it work was really satisfying". Other students provided feedback such as  “It could be frustrating at times but when completed was satisfying.” and “This experience was amazing and I learned something new every day of this camp” indicating the excitement and connection the students felt to the material even though they were doing the camp completely virtual. 

While the program is still in its early stages of development, the focus is currently on providing STEM experiences for rural students in the North Florida College (NFC) service area that includes 6 counties.  However, the research team hopes the learning will be beneficial for other rural regions of Florida and nationally. 

The pivot to a virtual delivery made the STEM SEALs LAND Challenge immediately more versatile and resulted in quicker progress towards leveraging virtual platforms.  Being able to access the STEM SEALs experience remotely became highly advantageous given its target of appealing to students in rural areas.  The only issues seemed to be slow internet in some areas, but most students worked through this challenge successfully.  The dyad framework also had unintended benefits of providing STEM exposure and professional development for teachers through the virtual camp, allowing for continually engaging the educators even after the camp ended. Many instructors maintained interest in the STEM SEALs grant and larger mission to build a STEM ecosystem in the area. By connecting directly with teachers and then connecting teachers to each other and the STEM SEALs development team, the project has made faster progress in creating a core group of educators who can serve as ambassadors as the College looks to strengthen its connection to regional K-12 institutions.

 Teachers, as well as students, provided information about their perceptions of STEM before and after the virtual camp.  We saw a statistically significant increase in the confidence of educators to do activities involved in the engineering design process from pre to post- Summer Institute.

While we did have a few issues with internet connection during the 8 days of the Summer Institute, the expert team at North Florida College were very patient and supported the students and educators over the whole of the camp experience. The challenges faced going virtual were addressed by ensuring that the materials were thorough and provided ample explanation, videos were made by the college faculty to substitute for in person demonstrations, and utilizing online platforms students would be familiar with such as Google classroom and Zoom meetings daily.

Once the decision was made to utilize dyads of teachers and students learning together, the recruitment for the Summer Institute began with connecting with teachers who would be interested in participating in the virtual program and their own children or close relatives who wanted to participate as these would be the only participants who would meet safety guidelines for COVID protocols at the time. 

The greatest successes were being able to connect with rural middle school students with a rigorous, challenging, but fun STEM program during pandemic protocols, and making new and lasting connections with middle school faculty that has continued to develop through related activities since the Summer Institute 2020.

 Hi Daniel, thanks for your question. When we began to think of STEM experiences that we could provide for the middle school students in our region, we wanted to make the activities they experienced in the Summer Institute relate to the local industries found in this north central part of Florida. This area of Florida has large farming operations, timber operations, lumber manufacturing, pulp and paper manufacturing, along with some boat manufacturing, but of course, Florida is known for NASA rocket launches, fishing and ecotourism. Then, we chose the three disciplines of the Navy SEALs, Land, Sea, and Air, to mimic with our students experiences.   In the Land Challenge, the students learn to build and code rovers, which can relate to the NASA program with rovers on Mars or to tractors with pulling farm equipment or future robots doing the farming for the farmers. For the SEA Challenge we relate the activities to building and coding boats and taking water samples for environmental analysis. For the Air Challenge, we have the students learn to fly drones and build and code a weather station, which relates to the use of drones for land management with the weather monitoring for farming/timber production and surviving in the tropical region. So each Challenge relates to the regional industries or life in Florida, and exposes students to the necessary STEM activities that will be the future of sustainability of the area industries.

Dan --We have also leveraged our access to those mostknowledgeable about the local context by soliciting the input of a group ofeducators from the region who, in collaboration with the expert team at thecommunity college, experiment with prototypes and co-create challenges that willbe relevant to students’ lives.  We havebeen intentional about making explicit connections to the local STEM school-to-careerpipeline through the selection of challenges that relate to local issues and areperformed locally using materials manufactured at the local community college,a college who provides training to ready students for careers within the region.  We hope to continue to build upon the literatureof place-based education by showing how a community college can anchor a STEM ecosystemin a rural area by recognizing, valuing, and nurturing the incredible assetsstudent within a culture of tinkering bring to STEM.  

 Thanks so much for your comment, Julie.  In reviewing your program Project ExCEED, it seems we are providing similar rural focused Engineering Design and STEM activities for the region teachers to develop their confidence in being able to learn and teach these type activities.  Our program did add the use of the dyads, where the teachers were both the learners and facilitators for students in the Summer Institute. This may be an option you want to consider in the future. We found from our research analysis, even during the all virtual summer experience in 2020, that the teachers developed from pre to post STEM SEALs statistically significant improvements in confidence in doing multiple aspects of Engineering Design tasks and self-efficacy in explaining when teaching Computational Thinking (Coding) skills.  

 

Hi Elizabeth, thank you for watching our video and connecting with us.  We are excited to help students in our region and potentially beyond to really see themselves connected to STEM in their everyday lives as well as their future careers as STEM-able, STEM-skilled, and STEM-belonging.