Science and Mathematics Education Commons^™

Art-Integration Through Making Dioramas Of Women Mathematicians’ Lives Enhances Creativity And Motivation, Audrey C. Rule, Dana L. Atwood-Blaine, Clayton M. Edwards, Mindy M. Gordon

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

Creativity is essential for solving problems in the workplace, natural environment, and everyday life, necessitating that creativity be nurtured in schools. Identification of factors that intrinsically motivate students to learn difficult or initially unappealing content is also important. This project, in which 24 racially diverse fifth grade girls created dioramas of the lives of diverse successful women mathematicians, explored the girls’ reactions to art integration into mathematics through a phenomenological qualitative analysis of their products, essays, and responses to questionnaires. The project supported the Next Generation Science Standard for engineering design, Standard 3-5-ETS1-1 and two National Core Arts Standards for …

Three- And Four-Year Olds Learn About Gears Through Arts Incorporation, Dessy Stoycheva, Leann M. Perkins

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This research paper explores art integration into a science lesson unit that follows the Next Generation Science Standards (K-PS2-1) and focuses on the effects on memory retention of key concepts along with levels of enjoyment. An experiment was conducted with children ages 3 and 4 teaching scientific concepts about gears while incorporating student-made art products. The children were assigned to alternating experimental (art-integrated) or control (no art) conditions during the four stages of the lesson. The results did not show statistically significant differences at the alpha = 0.05 level between conditions in the amount of information retained based on the …

Fourth Graders Make Inventions Using Scamper And Animal Adaptation Ideas, Mahjabeen Hussain, Anastasia Carignan

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This study explores to what extent the SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Rearrange) technique combined with animal adaptation ideas learned through form and function analogy activities can help fourth graders generate creative ideas while augmenting their inventiveness. The sample consisted of 24 fourth grade students (14 female, 10 male) ages 9-10 at a suburban Midwestern elementary school. A repeated-measures design involving all participants alternately in the two conditions measured students under each treatment condition. In the experimental condition, students used SCAMPER charts with animal adaptation ideas to generate ideas to improve a product using …

Second-Graders Beautify For Butterflies, Andrea E. Anderson, Jessica A. Meier

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This practical article presents activities that support previous research suggesting the integration of art with science is beneficial to the learning and cooperative processes of children. The project showcased here highlights the ability of elementary school children to collaborate with their peers for problem solving and critical thinking through the artistic use of observation and sketching. This article discusses effective lesson activities in which students combined art and science by creating and cultivating a butterfly garden on the school’s property.

Who Moved Those Rain Clouds To Town? Making Windbirds To Learn About The Power Of Wind, Deepanee Samarakoon, Latisha L. Smith

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

In this practical article, a kindergarten teacher shares a lesson designed to teach students about the power of wind. To address the Next Generation Science Standards engineering standards, students discussed the negative and positive aspects of wind and made daily weather observations (K-ESS2-1). Students constructed bird-shaped windsocks, called windbirds, to explore how the shape of the object allowed it to move in the wind (K-2-ETS1-2). To address the National Core Arts Standards, creative arts were integrated as students designed cylindrical windbirds of colorful materials. The windbirds were used to observe the effects of wind in the students’ outdoor environment at …

Water Play, Jane E. Cline, Brandy A. Smith

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

The inclusion of activities to develop sensory awareness, spatial thinking, and physical dexterity, operationalized through hands-on science lessons such as water play, have long been part of early childhood education. This practical article addresses Next Generation Science Standards K-2 ETS1-3 and K-2 ETS1-2 by having four-year-old prekindergarten students direct the path of water on a vertical pegboard water table with strategically-placed, attached plastic cups with holes drilled into them that leak streams of water into each other. Students enhanced their retelling of the story of the Billy Goats Gruff by placing student-made watercolor artwork along the path of the water, …

Using Creativity From Art And Engineering To Engage Students In Science, Mason Albert Kuhn, Scott Greenhalgh, Mark Mcdermott

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

STEAM education, referring to integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics, is a contemporary buzzword that is popular in many schools. In particular, many elementary school teachers who have been tasked to incorporate STEM teaching, because of the requirements of the Next Generation Science Standards, attempt to apply the arts in their science curriculum because they feel more comfortable using instructional approaches that incorporate creative activities such as crafts, drawing, and model construction than the core practices of STEM disciplines. Teachers can use the creative arts activities in two ways to enhance the STEM learning environment: 1) Using creative processes …

Spatial Thinking Skills And Stem Connections: How Does This Issue Address Them?, Audrey C. Rule

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

In this editorial, the Editor considered the importance of spatial thinking skills to STEM careers, provided examples of ways scientists use spatial thinking, noted sex and socioeconomic differences in spatial skill proficiency, and reviewed ways that activities included in articles in this issue involved spatial thinking. Brief summaries and preview images were provided for the articles in the issue. The four-component spatial thinking classification scheme with categories of intrinsic-static, intrinsic-dynamic, extrinsic-static and extrinsic dynamic was applied to the activities from this issue of the Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions. All categories of this classification scheme were addressed, providing …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2016, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

The Peec Experiment: Native Hawaiian And Native American Engineering Education, Suzette R. Burckhard, Joanita M. Kant

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Books

PART I: Context
1. Engineering for Native nations: Origins and goals of the Pre-Engineering Education Collaboratives (PEECs)
PART II: Culture matters
2. Recognizing history: Indigeneity matters
3. Moving beyond cultural sensitivity: Developing culturally responsive programs for and with Native engineers
4. Invoking cultural relevance at tribal colleges: Grandmother’s way is important
5. Discovering what works: STEM pedagogy and curriculum development for Native Americans
6. Exploring indigenous science and engineering: Projects with indigenous roots
PART III: Providing support for Natives in Engineering
7. Finding an Engineering identity: A Native American PEEC leader’s experience
8. Outreaching to K-12 and tribal schools in …

The Association Between Tolerance For Ambiguity And Fear Of Negative Evaluation: A Study Of Engineering Technology Capstone Courses, Sergey I. Dubikovsky

Open Access Dissertations

For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These truly integrative design activities do not have a single “correct” solution. Instead, there is an array of solutions, many of which could be used to achieve the final result. This ambiguity can cause students to experience anxiety during the projects.

This study examined the main topics: • …

Race, Class And Gender In Engineering Education: A Quantitative Investigation Of First Year Enrollment, Canek Moises Luna Phillips

Open Access Dissertations

Research explanations for the disparity across both race and gender in engineering education has typically relied on a deficit model, whereby women and people of color lack the requisite knowledge or psychological characteristics that Whites and men have to become engineers in sufficient numbers. Instead of using a deficit model approach to explain gender and race disparity, in the three studies conducted for this dissertation, I approach gender and race disparity as the result of processes of segregation linked to the historic and on-going perpetuation of systemic sources of oppression in the United States. In the first study, I investigate …

Students' Explanations In Complex Learning Of Disciplinary Programming, Camilo Vieira

Open Access Dissertations

Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) has been denominated as the third pillar of science and as a set of important skills to solve the problems of a global society. Along with the theoretical and the experimental approaches, computation offers a third alternative to solve complex problems that require processing large amounts of data, or representing complex phenomena that are not easy to experiment with. Despite the relevance of CSE, current professionals and scientists are not well prepared to take advantage of this set of tools and methods. Computation is usually taught in an isolated way from engineering disciplines, and therefore, …

Leveling The Playing Field: Teacher Perception Of Integrated Stem, Engineering, And Engineering Practices, Bridgette Fincher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to describe the perceptions and approaches of 14 third-through-fifth grade Arkansan elementary teachers towards integrative engineering and engineering practices during 80 hours of integrated STEM professional development training in the summer and fall of 2014. This training was known as Project Flight. The purpose of the professional development was to learn integrated STEM content related to aviation and to write grade level curriculum units using Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design curriculum framework. The current study builds upon on the original research.

Using a mixed method exploratory, embedded QUAL[quan] case study design and a …

Improving The Speech Intelligibility By Cochlear Implant Users, Behnam Azimi

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we focus on improving the intelligibility of speech for cochlear implants (CI) users. As an auditory prosthetic device, CI can restore hearing sensations for most patients with profound hearing loss in both ears in a quiet background. However, CI users still have serious problems in understanding speech in noisy and reverberant environments. Also, bandwidth limitation, missing temporal fine structures, and reduced spectral resolution due to a limited number of electrodes are other factors that raise the difficulty of hearing in noisy conditions for CI users, regardless of the type of noise. To mitigate these difficulties for CI …

Process Development For The Fabrication Of Semiconductor Devices And Circuits Using Spin-On Dopant, Richard R. Ryan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traditional approaches to semiconductor device fabrication are expensive and time consuming, making them out of reach for most universities and colleges. The objective of this thesis is to develop a process by which semiconductor devices and circuits can be implemented completely in-house using spin-on dopants (SODs), and low-cost transparency masks, to significantly reduce the lead time, complexity, and cost associated with device fabrication. This will allow hands on fabrication experience for students at universities and colleges without the traditional expensive device fabrication facilities. In addition, it will also allow students and professors to design, fabricate and test semiconductor devices and …

Harmonic Scale Transformations, John H. Chalmers

The STEAM Journal

My artwork derives from a project to delineate the transformations certain types of harmonic musical scales undergo as the sizes of their generating intervals vary over the space of the octave.

Eastern Kentucky University's Program Of Distinction: Highlighting Research Within The Colege Of Justice And Safety, Naomi M. Sigler, Kayla Tunajek

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Posters at the Capitol 2016-2017 Abstract

University: Eastern Kentucky University – College of Justice & Safety

Program: Fire, Arson, and Explosion Investigation

Student Presenters: Kayla Tunajek and Naomi Sigler

Faculty Mentor: Paul Grant

Title: Eastern Kentucky University’s Program of Distinction: Highlighting Research within the College of Justice and Safety

Keywords: Program of Distinction; Eastern Kentucky University; fire programs; research projects; student opportunities.

ABSTRACT

This project is intended to represent the Program of Distinction at EKU. The fire program at Eastern provides students several unique majors and encourages students to do research within their respective fields. This research is then presented …

Portable Water Purification System, Marc Compere, Yan Tang, Shavin Pinto, Yung Wong

Publications

An ultra-portable water purification system (1). The system (1) can include a pump (22) for pumping water under pressure through the water purification system (1). The system (1) can also include a battery (14) for supplying power to operate the pump (22), a power source (10) for providing power to the battery (14) and the pump (22), and a charge controller (18), electrically connected to the power source (10), battery (14), and pump (22), for regulating power received from the power source (10) and limiting the power provided to the battery (14) to power the pump (22). The water purification …

Balloonsat As An Outreach Platform, Nicholas Jordan, Francis Wessling

Von Braun Symposium Student Posters

No abstract provided.

Evolution Of A First-Year Engineering Course, Noah Salzman, Janet Callahan, Gary Leroy Hunt, Carol Sevier, Amy J. Moll

Amy J. Moll

The first-year engineering course at Boise State University has evolved significantly over the past decade as a result of continuous improvement with a particular focus on student retention. The course was originally created in 1999-2001 as an “Introduction to Engineering” course in order to recruit students to one of the fields of engineering, by introducing those fields of engineering as topics across the semester. Over the first ten years, the course continued that introductory-to-field focus while also introducing a significant design element solving openended engineering problems. As a result of a five-year grant aimed toward improving first-year retention, the first-year …

Evolution Of A First-Year Engineering Course, Noah Salzman, Janet Callahan, Gary Leroy Hunt, Carol Sevier, Amy J. Moll

Janet M. Callahan

The first-year engineering course at Boise State University has evolved significantly over the past decade as a result of continuous improvement with a particular focus on student retention. The course was originally created in 1999-2001 as an “Introduction to Engineering” course in order to recruit students to one of the fields of engineering, by introducing those fields of engineering as topics across the semester. Over the first ten years, the course continued that introductory-to-field focus while also introducing a significant design element solving openended engineering problems. As a result of a five-year grant aimed toward improving first-year retention, the first-year …

Learning Form And Function By Dance-Dramatizing Cultural Legends To Drum Rhythms Wearing Student-Made Animal Masks, Phyllis Gray, Audrey C. Rule, Gloria Kirkland Holmes, Stephanie R. Logan, Andrea L. Alert, Cynthia A. Mason

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This study examined the self-efficacy in science, art, dance, and music; attitudes concerning contributions of people of various ethnic/cultural groups; and science learning of students involved in an after-school arts-integrated science enrichment project. Students dramatized three traditional animal legends from African, Native American, and Mexican cultures to drum beats while wearing student-made papier-mâché helmet crest masks of the animal characters. They learned the structure and functions of the featured animals through slide shows, embedded explanations in the play scripts, and hands-on form and function analogy materials that related the form and function of animal body parts to manufactured items. Although …

Third Graders Explore Sound Concepts Through Online Research Compared To Making Musical Instruments, Kyrie D. Borsay, Page Foss

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This study is an exploration of several lessons on sound taught to third grade students using one of the Next Generation Science Standards (3-5-ETS1) and arts integration. A counterbalanced, pretest- posttest- distal posttest design experiment was conducted to compare student knowledge and attitudes between the control and experimental conditions. Control activities included learning about either stringed or percussion instruments (whichever not addressed in the experimental condition) through online searches for information and writing a factual paragraph; experimental activities included creating a percussion or stringed instrument using classroom art materials purchased with an imaginary budget. One group experienced the experimental condition …

Shadow Puppet Plays In Elementary Science Methods Class Help Preservice Teachers Learn About Minority Scientists, Phyllis Gray, Audrey C. Rule, Anneliese Gentzsch, Denise Tallakson

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This practical article describes an arts-integrated project with engineering design and science concepts from the Next Generation Science Standards, art principles from the National Arts Standards, as well as ideas under the theme of “Culture” from the National Council for the Social Studies Standards. Preservice teachers in an undergraduate science methods class researched the background, life, and accomplishments of a minority scientist by reading books and articles about the person. They created a script to present the experiences and contributions of the scientist to other preservice teachers and, eventually, elementary students. Shadow puppets were constructed out of cardboard to portray …

Preschoolers Explore Greenhouses By Visiting A Greenhouse, Making A Model, And Growing Plants, Leann M. Perkins, Dessy Stoycheva

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

This practical lesson on greenhouses implements standards of the Next Generation Science Standards (K-2 ETS I-2; K-LS1-1) and the preschool objectives from the Teaching Strategies GOLD. Teaching Strategies GOLD is an assessment tool available online and in print that can be used with any developmentally appropriate early childhood curriculum. The lesson structure follows the 5E’s Learning Cycle Constructivist Model for teaching and the project-based, hands-on approach to learning. The preschool-aged children went on a field trip to a working greenhouse and then collaborated in groups to produce a three-dimensional model of a greenhouse as arts integration into this science project. …

Designing An Earthquake-Proof Art Museum: An Arts-And Engineering-Integrated Science Lesson, Anastasia Carignan, Mahjabeen Hussain

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

In this practical arts-integrated science and engineering lesson, an inquiry-based approach was adopted to teach a class of fourth graders in a Midwest elementary school about the scientific concepts of plate tectonics and earthquakes. Lessons were prepared following the 5 E instructional model. Next Generation Science Standards (4-ESS3-2) and the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards for fourth grade (Visual Arts: Creating 1.14a, Visual Arts: Creating 2.1.4a, and Visual Arts: Creating 3.1.4a) were addressed challenging students to create an earthquake-resistant structure to support a clay sculpture in a model of an art gallery for an earthquake-prone area. First, content knowledge …

Editorial: Welcome To The Journal Of Stem Arts, Crafts, And Constructions, Audrey C. Rule

Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions

The Journal of STEM Arts, Crafts, and Constructions is a scholarly journal that seeks to engage professionals, including preK-12 teachers, in a conversation about the benefits of arts integration; the ways that the STEM subjects can be integrated with the arts to produce effective teaching (STEAM Education); and how the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), can be effectively implemented with integrated arts, crafts, or constructions. Manuscripts, including guest editorials, are blind peer-reviewed by usually two reviewers and an associate editor or by three reviewers. This editorial explains the Journal’s origin in a faculty professional learning community. The Journal has a …

Effective Integration Of Nasa Stem Curricula Is Allowing Students To Appreciate Earth Science Concepts, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Krishna Mahabir, Newrence Wills, Matthew Khargie

Publications and Research

NASA Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Aerospace Academy - MAA is a national, innovative activity designed to increase participation and retention of historically underserved and underrepresented K-12 youth in the STEM disciplines, particularly earth science and human exploration (HEO). HEO is dedicated to informing and educating the public about NASA's plans for a new era in space exploration. Utilization of NASA satellite images, online climate education, space mathematics and other earth science-related resources is allowing students to conduct basic research and prepare themselves for a New York City-wide science competition. In addition to offering school children a solid …

Experiential Learning Opportunities Through Nasa Stem Content Allows Greater Grass Root-Level Understanding Of The Present Day’S Extreme Climate Change Scenario, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Matthew Khargie

Publications and Research

The NASA MAA (MUREP Aerospace Academy) project at York College has demonstrated a track record of providing experiential learning opportunities (ELO) to its participating students. ELOs associated with MAA are designed to increase learners’ involvement, knowledge, comprehension and application of learning in one or more STEM subjects/disciplines. They involve inquiry-and-activity-based learning approaches designed for the level of the learner to inspire, engage, and educate while progressively challenging each student. ELO activities enable learners to acquire knowledge, understand what they have learned, and apply that knowledge through inquiry-based tasks. Specifically, we are prepared to address the following priority: Encourage, increase, and …