Clever acronym!  I didn't see mention of the STITCH Roller Coaster t-shirt...did I miss something?

What an innovative project! To what do you attribute your success in recruiting teachers? Was it the project itself or method of outreach? Is the STITCH curriculum widely available to all educators?

This is so creative and seems like such a fun way to learn! I be this also capitalizes on the benefits of embodied learning. Is embodied learning a theory which your team has actively used to frame the project?

 This is a great way to integrate traditional concepts with applied STEM.  I have already shared with some colleagues.  Will the website give an idea of what a teacher needs for content knowledge and supply costs to implement?  

Thanks for sharing!  The demand for teachers to participate being so high is great!  What sorts of scaffolding was needed in professional development?  It seems there are technical skills to learn in working with microcontrollers, etc. but also it seemed students were empowered to choose their own projects.  Giving students this flexibility and freedom is a great learning strategy but can be challenging to implement in a large class and teachers might be concerned about how all this time aligns with the core content of the course.  Did you experience any of these challenges and if so how did you navigate them?  

Teachers needed scaffolding in terms of science content and programming. So, for instance, we have teachers give us instructions for making a sandwich to illustrate the point that the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do. We make a big mess (mayo and mustard required!), have a lot of fun, and suddenly writing code feels a little less intimidating. We wrote a paper for ICLS 2018 (see volume 1) on how our professional development model evolved to include more scaffolding over the years of the project.

The projects follow a specified sequence, which teachers can adapt to their standards (all projects are standards-aligned) and available time. All projects have the same circuitry requirements, but students choose how to integrate them into an aesthetic design, resulting in projects that look very different. Some projects, like the temperature sensing lunchbox, follow a template. In order to teach thermal heat transfer, we compromised on the aesthetic dimensions of this particular project. Students can personalize if they finish early or in out of school time. During professional development, we try to model the organized chaos of everyone working on a project that is the same but different and ask them to help each other with debugging, so they seem the same functional circuit crafted in a variety of different ways. This translates to them more easily being able to help their students troubleshoot when the time comes.

Great to see how students are developing science knowledge and technology skills while engaged in a tactile design project.  Authentic connection to the aesthetics of design.