Thank you for raising these good questions. We started the program as an after school program at a local middle school. The project evolved over time to become a couple of different versions: one formal and one informal. The informal one is this STEM+L project that includes a summer week-long module plus a fall extension and the formal one is an elective STEAM course for a local middle school. For this STEM+L project, students are recruited on a first-come, first-served basis. Since it's open to all, we don't really get to connect with their teachers. The research team, including the PIs and graduate students (and guest speakers), deliver the instruction for this project. For this coming round, we plan to conduct a teacher/educator workshop to disseminate our program materials to other places. 

Thanks for your interest and questions. I think part of the motivation is to engage students in learning not only science (often in an isolated way), but also STEM plus digital literacy all together. Especially consider that the young generation is growing up with all kinds of digital and social media. This is also in many ways emulating real life scenarios such as making a film (e.g., a couple of scientific papers, led by Kip Thorne, were published based on the simulations made for the film Interstellar). In this kind of learning environment, students get to practice STEM+L in an authentic way.

For the program, in the Fall extension, students are mainly working on their team projects. We also provide additional lectures, tutorial, STEM activities, and lots of feedback to their projects.  

Our research is still on-going and we'll present some preliminary results at ICLS this summer. In a nutshell, we found interesting patterns and trajectories of student learning when they take on disciplinary roles, make multimodal artifacts, and practice integrated STEM+L. 

Thank you so much for the questions.

To gain insights into the research questions, such as students' participation patterns and trajectories, we collected survey responses at three critical time points, video recordings of group working, final interviews, multimodal artifacts, and any process data (e.g., logging data of the process of creating interactive online book) during multimodal composing. The data capture students' changes in two aspects: the form and the degree of participation. 

The key construct we are measuring is "participation." The form of participation includes three dimensions: attitudes and interests in disciplinary roles,(especially integrated) disciplinary knowledge and practices, and recognized by oneself or by others as a disciplinary person. The degree of participation includes both the breadth and depth of participation. The breadth refers to time on task and number of contributions while the depth of participation speaks to the authorship of ideas (e.g., generating new ideas as an originator and evaluating existing ideas as a critic).

Theories guide our work includes disciplinary identity development (Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Nasir and Hand, 2008; Van Horne & Bell, 2017) and community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1998). The two theoretical perspectives provide a necessary lens for investigating the form and degree of participation respectively.

Through showing participation patterns and trajectories, we could get insights on factors that contribute to changes in forms and degrees of participation.

Also, we have two presentations in ICLS this summer, one is "Multimodal Reflection: Adolescents Remixing and Sharing their Experiences in an Informal STEM+L Academy" and the other is "Examining Science Identity Development in a Disciplinary Role-taking Multimodal Composing Environment." Welcome to our session!

Thank you for sharing the extension of SF with STEM.  Our project also builds the tie with ELA through a science shelf for independent reading developed from vetted out books during our years selecting them and monitoring them online.  We are expecting to continue to expand the online reading as the shelf and activities as reading "circles" has been popular and fits with our other digital visualization activities.

Hope to hear more about how you continue to consider the Community of Practice concept into your project and future plans.  I am also interest in how you will address the growing student privacy issues.

Thanks again.

Thank you Lei. We don't have formal "assessment" per se. We collected different types of data to understanding their learning processes and gains (Please see Yan's response above). We do focus on integration among different aspects/fields, including identty development when taking on different roles (eg. from singular identities to hybrid ones), modality integration (integrating different modes of representations), and content and practice integration (e.g., examining how students integrate science, writing, and design elements in their artifacts).

It was an international science fiction film festival held here at Miami. On saturday morning there's a session open to the public and our program was programmed in that session. It was a driving force for most of our participants as they love to showcase their products. It was the last session so we didn't collect any formal data but based on our observation they, both participants and parents, were all very excited and engaged. It was also a learning experience for many of them. We spent some time during the last couple of fall extension sessions for the students to practice their presentations (each team were given 1 minute to summarize their work in front of a poster they made themselves).  Some students expressed anxiety during those training sessions as they were anticipating a stage freight, but they all did an excellent job presenting their work.

We include a variety of different tools, e.g.,

• Pixton: A cross-platform application for designing characters and comics.
• Scratch: A visual programming environment for creating animations and games.
• Moviemaker: A windows program that allows students to create and edit videos.
• Pixlr: A web-based platform application for designing posters.
• iKOS: A web-based knowledge organization platform for individuals and/or groups to construct, share, and organize knowledge in multimodal representations. This is the platform they used to compile their multimodal fictions.

We don't have financial assistantship built in. However, the academy is free of charge. We also provided bus service.