Group-Based Cloud Computing for Secondary STEM Education

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). The Group-based Cloud Computing (GbCC) for STEM Education Project investigates pre-service teacher designing, developing, implementing, and enacting a sociotechnological system for group-centered STEM teaching and learning consistent with a nationally recognized pre-service program. The project takes a design-based research approach to creating and studying technologies and materials that support generative teaching and learning in STEM. Computational thinking, including agent-based modeling, and simulation across STEM domains as well as geo-spatial reasoning about personally meaningful learner-collected data will provides an important scientific foundation for the project. This will be achieved by developing a highly-interactive and group-optimized, browserand cloud-based, deviceindependent and open-source architecture and by integrating and extending leading computational tools including the NSF-funded NetLogo Web agent-based modeling language and environment.