This ethnographic study explores the crucial role of family engagement in educational systems and the impact a human-centered design team has on students' success at an elementary school. The research addresses the historical impact of racism and colonization on student outcomes alongside the ongoing challenge of narrowing the opportunity gap.…

Based on observations of global design classes at different institutions, students selected technologies without justification for the suitability of the technology to support their collaborative design activities. To best support students in their collaborative endeavours, a short online course in computer-supported collaborative design was…

This article explores the concept of STEM education and characteristics of truly authentic STEM learning experiences and events. It examines the engineering design process and how engineering glues science, mathematics and technology together. Two engineering challenges, 'Design and build a bridge' and 'Design and make a catapult', carried out…

Maximising students' creative potential to address contemporary issues and fostering cross-disciplinary learning are on the agenda of both top-down and bottom-up educational initiatives. Within the framework of research about cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration, this article argues for the capacity of cross-disciplinary online…

This activity provides opportunities for middle school students to design bio-inspired, eco-friendly vehicles. Twenty-four 8th grade students (12 girls, 12 boys) engaged in the activity which was implemented in four class periods, 40 minutes each, in an elective Environmental Education course. During the activity, students engaged in engineering…

Background: Many undergraduate students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields lack experience in collaborative thinking, limiting their effectiveness as they enter careers in academic and industrial environments. The SyBBURE Searle Undergraduate Research Program has incorporated a team-based design component…

Attempting to educate practitioners of computer security can be difficult if for no other reason than the breadth of knowledge required today. The security profession includes widely diverse subfields including cryptography, network architectures, programming, programming languages, design, coding practices, software testing, pattern recognition,…

Purpose: A coalition of students, professors, administrators and operational staff at Lafayette College designed an environmental module to integrate in-class curricular education with out-of-class environmental engagement. The purpose of this study was to improve the ethos of sustainability across campus. Design/methodology/approach: The research…

In the United States, there has been an increased emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and especially engineering, in pre-college settings. There are several potential benefits of this, including: increasing the quantity and diversity of students who pursue STEM careers, improving all students' technological…

Research suggests that, to narrow the gender gap in engineering, we should focus on helping young girls identify with engineering both because gendered attitudes emerge around kindergarten and because identity is more predictive than performance on persistence in the field. This qualitative study sought to understand the impact of collaborative…

Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) is the cornerstone course of a traditional information system curriculum. Conventionally, it is a sequence of two courses with the second course dedicated to the completion of a project. However, it has recently become more common to reduce the two-course sequence into one, especially for IS departments that…

In the past technology products created to overcome accessibility and usability issues experienced by individuals with special needs have also resulted in greater usability for the wider population. Technology is increasingly being seen as a key component within the education of children with special needs and recently researchers have developed…

New technologies, such as social networks, wikis, blogs and other social tools, enable collaborative work and are important facilitators of the social learning process. Many companies are using these types of tools as substitutes for their intranets, especially software development companies. However, the content generated by these tools in many…

Hopscotch, basketball, or hide-and-seek? Children have many choices at recess, and while making these choices they must consider and make trade-offs. The way they make these decisions is not that different from the thought processes engineers use when making design trade-offs. Engineers have to make trade-offs because a design that meets all…

Summer outreach programs provide pre-college participants an introduction to college life and exposure to engineering in an effort to raise the level of interest and bring more students into engineering fields. The Junior Engineering, Mathematics, and Science (JEMS) program is a project-based summer workshop in which teams of high school students…