Hello!

Thank you for visiting our page and watching our video! We are a team of math education researchers from North Carolina State University. In our video, we talk about our project, the Design & Pitch Challenges in STEM. Under the leadership of Dr. Jere Confrey and Dr. Erin Krupa, we designed these challenges to support rich mathematics learning and promote interest and engagement in STEM, through entrepreneurial pitch competitions. We’ve created nine math-focused STEM design challenges that address authentic entrepreneurial opportunities. Each challenge is launched by a different STEM or entrepreneurial professional and includes connections to real-world applications and STEM careers. Watch the video and let us know what you think! We're excited to hear from you!

This is really cool. I used to tutor middle-school math, and I had one student who refused to do homework unless I could explain how he'd ever use it again. We're not in touch anymore, and that student must be 25 by now, but I bet their younger self would have LOVED this.

This is such a cool idea and I can clearly see the tie to student engagement and relevance. Engagement and relevance are important for all students and especially important for students who may feel disconnected from more traditional "school mathematics" or whose identity may not include positive perspectives of mathematics.   Have you done any research on the impact of students' math identity as related to participation in this work?

Hi Jessica! Thank you for commenting on our video!

You raise a great point about students' math identity and students' feeling disconnected from traditional school mathematics. We have not focused explicitly on how participation in the challenges impacts students' math identities, but it would be really interesting to explore and measure. What we have seen that is encouraging is that, because students are drawing on their often unique out-of-school interests in building their solutions, they feel empowered as the experts relative to those solutions and they are excited to explain and defend their thinking, including the math. One of the challenges we have experienced and we continue to work on is how to help students collaborate effectively so that one student is not assigned to do the math while others work on the less mathematical aspects of a challenge. Even in those cases, focusing on the less mathematical aspects can give some students a way to meaningfully contribute to their groups' solutions and, over time, to engage more with the targeted mathematics.  

I can't remember, have you explored math identity in your work researching learning disabilities in math? I'd love to learn more about how math identity fits into your work! 

I am in the process of partnering with Jonee Wilson to examine how equitable teaching practices can increase participation in conceptually oriented mathematics for students with disabilities and how this may influence theirmath identity.  More soon!

This is really interesting work, thank you for sharing it! I love how you are embedding math in real world contexts that students care about and become invested in, and that they can apply their everyday knowledge to. One thing I wondered watching your video, and thinking about research on PBL, is how to scaffold students using particular math concepts when formulating their pitches and doing all the background work. Are there particular math standards that you are seeking to cover? If so, how to you make sure that students are covering the math concepts you want to cover? Also, are there ways that the teacher or the curriculum tries to highlight the relevant math concepts, so that they don't get lost in all the other kinds of activities going on?

Fascinating!! Love this idea! I think where the teacher highlights the cross-disciplinary nature of this activity is key, and that students actually see a real-world scenario/process through from start to finish. There is honestly SO much students could glean from an activity such as this!  Did you capture any of that (student feedback as to what they learned?)  I am also curious, who voted for the winners and what type of criteria were projects being judged on?  Thank you for sharing!!

Great ideas for a way to engage students in rich design thinking and authentic mathematics. What kinds of data are you collecting to evaluate the nature of students' mathematical learning, thinking, and engagement? What kind of professional learning are teachers engaged in to enact the project? Do they have opportunities to share knowledge across schools/sites? Thanks for sharing the project!

Hi Holly! Thank you for the kind words! You're absolutely right that how the teacher highlights/supports the cross-disciplinary connections is key and it's something we are continually working on. As math educators, it's easy for us to get overly focused on the math. When we talk to students, they often talk about learning to design a business or an app or build an algorithm. When we ask about the math, they try to find where they carried out calculations, ignoring that they wrote symbolic spreadsheet formulas or built hypothetical data representations (for example). So, that has been a struggle for us - making students aware of the rich math they are doing. In terms of the pitch, we recruit and ask teachers to recruit external judges for both the final pitch competition and a practice pitch that we run a day or two before the final competition. These can be community members, parents, members of the school community (e.g., principals or resource teachers), or STEM professionals. We want the judges to be people who are not familiar with students' solutions before the final pitch. It raises the stakes for students when they think the judges know nothing about their solutions and we've seen them rise to the occasion. We ask the judges to use a rubric that focuses on the entrepreneurial viability of the solutions and not the math, as that would not normally be part of an entrepreneurial pitch. We include a rubric for the teacher to assess students' mathematics after the competition. I hope this helps! I'd love to learn more about how, in your work, you help teachers connect the real-world science to curricular goals. Your project is fascinating!

Hi Heidi!

Thank you for your kind words! So far, we have been mostly collecting and analyzing qualitative data. These have included video records of teams working on a challenge, participating in practice and final pitches, participating in whole-class discussions, and checking in with teachers/researchers. We've been collecting and analyzing students' work samples, including their key business propositions, tech briefs, pitch decks, and scrap work to understand what mathematics students are using, how they're using it, and how their solutions develop over the course of the study and in relation to the entrepreneurial considerations of the competition. We've also conducted interviews and focus groups with students and teachers during and after competitions to understand both engagement and the development of students' mathematical reasoning. PD has been a challenge for us given the teachers' time constraints and now COVID. We've done a few in-school  (pre-COVID) half-day workshops where we ran teachers through a challenge, while discussing how to implement with students. This past summer, we led a week-long virtual offering where we spent more time discussing the model and incorporated opportunities for teachers to anticipate and discuss potential difficulties/concerns. In general, teachers have reported positive perceptions of the PD, but we're still trying to find ways to better support them, especially with connecting students' challenge work back to the standards. As for connecting across sites, that is something that we have not yet found a way to do effectively. We would love to hear ideas for how to create this type of professional learning community. Do you have experience doing this type of work with teachers?

Thank you for participating in the discussion!

The link to our website is not so obvious on this page, so we want to make sure you know that all of our materials are free and available: https://sites.ced.ncsu.edu/design-and-pitch/ The materials include:

• Role Model Videos (n=3)
• Challenge Champion videos (n=18 a launch and background video for each challenge)
• 9 Challenges
• Technology Tools (coming soon; specific ones for each challenge)
• Standards-alignment
• Teacher guides (coming soon; specific for each challenge)

Each Challenge includes: Challenge statement, background resources, key business proposition, pitch resources, tech brief (to show their mathematical thinking and design process), judging sheet, and grading rubric.

This idea of engaging students in entrepreneurship to involve them in using math in a way that is important and meaningful for them is genius. I'm curious how this looks in a math classroom. How much time is dedicated to supporting the development of the pitches in class vs. out of class? Do teachers feel pressure to "cover" more topics and so push back on doing projects like this? 

This is an innovative project and an excellent way to make learning activities authentic. The 3-day entrepreneurship competition is an excellent idea way for increasing students interest in math. The students not only engage in real life activities but in interaction with persons who can serve as mentors. Did the students choose the activities and person in which they would like to engage in ? Or were they assigned to them?  Do you think 3-days were adequate to accomplish the goal of the project?

Hi Dr. Clark! Thank you for your questions! Dr. Confrey came up with the idea for the project after participating in a 3-day competition, but, in adapting it for use in schools, we developed a 6-day model. Even though we really liked the idea of bringing the pressure and excitement of a 3-day model into the classroom, we realized it just would not be enough time for students. We've also developed an 8-day classroom model and a virtual model where students can participate independently (this was a summer model) or teachers can participate with their classes and can choose how much time they spend on the challenge. So far, we think the 6-day and 8-day models are ideal for keeping kids engaged.

To your question about how students choose challenges, our approach has evolved over the course of building the materials. Originally, the plan was to allow each team to choose from the nine challenges - this would be more in line with how real pitch competitions work. However, this made implementation really difficult, as the challenge launch is so important to getting students excited about the competition and helping them to understand the context. Asking teachers to launch multiple challenges at the same time, seemed overwhelming and so we switched to encouraging the teacher to pick one challenge to implement at a time. In terms of the mentors, we should mention that these are videos of mentors. Each challenge includes two videos, one video in which a STEM professional launches the challenge and one in which the same professional gives some background on the context and discusses their experiences in STEM. So, students don't get to do face-to-face interaction with the mentors. Rather, they do it through the supporting videos. It would be great if we could find ways to have greater interaction between mentors and students, though. One way we have tried to do this is through the selection of practice judges and final pitch judges. We've seen schools bring in outside experts to give students feedback on their solutions and in some cases judge the final pitches. Did you have any thoughts on how to support teachers to bring mentors into the classroom for face-to-face interaction? It seems like it would be a great way to get more community involvement in the competitions! Thank you for your thoughtful questions!