Thank you for visiting the UNLV ITEST video showcase. I would like to thank our Co-PIs, Drs. Shaoan Zhang and Venki Muthukumar, the external evaluator Dr. Yonghong Xu, our instructors Dr. Binayak Tiwari, Ms. Jingyuan Dai, Ms. Manisha Ghimire, and GA Mr. Daniel Unger for their work for our ITEST project. Thank all the CCSD teacher mentors and UNLV student mentors for their contribution to this project. Thank all the students, parents, and volunteers for their participation. Thanks to UNLV College of Engineering, College of Education, CCSD, our partners and sponsors for their great support. The background music Liftoff is composed and played by Mr. Raymond Zhang, lyrics written by Ms. Autumn Wyland. The GUIC Summer Camp Highlights with the complete camp song (sung by Cassandra Kliewer) can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16cWkbnS8to&amp.... You are welcome to leave your comment and suggestion. We will try to respond in a timely manner.

I love what Nevada is doing with CCSD with girls in STEM~ 

Zara, Thanks for the encouragement. 

Thank you for sharing your project exposing female students to computing and engineering. I appreciated the tiered team structure where teachers and university students mentor the middle and high school students. I found in my work that teachers appreciate working with undergraduate engineering students who bring technical expertise in computing and engineering, but can also serve as near peer mentors to MS and HS students. Can you discuss how you recruited the teachers? And what were some of the challenges you encountered during the 3 weeks camp? I am also interested to learn more about how you measured impact of the program. Can you share a little about the results from the 2021 camp?

Superb job! 

I love this, well done! 

Nidaa, we appreciate your comments on our project, particularly the tiered team. We recruited teachers through a coordinator in the school district. She shared with the school administrators and program coordinators our recruitment letter that includes the application information. One challenge we encountered during the 3 weeks camp was balancing the level of content knowledge and students' knowledge background that influences their learning. Particularly, students' grade levels range from 7th to 11th grade. We measured the impact of the program on students' knowledge, motivations, and self-efficacy through a quantitative survey and interviews. The quantitative results of descriptive analysis from the 2021 camp showed that, OVERALL, student evaluation of their summer camp experience was very positive. Thank you for your question. 

Thanks for sharing your work. In previous projects, I've worked with teams looking at how middle school youth develop their identities relative to STEM through engineering or design experiences. So I'm interested to hear more about what you've learned in terms of supporting self-efficacy. Beyond the overall impacts, what are you learning about the ways that girls are able to develop their STEM-related identities and self-efficacy through the program? What challenges are you encountering? Thanks again for sharing!

Scott, I am glad to know that you are also doing secondary students' STEM education focusing on their identity development. Our study focuses on engaging secondary female students in a constructive learning environment (CLE) to enhance their self confidence in STEM related fields and encourage interest in STEM learning. Specifically, we found that students gained sense of belonging. The tiered team structure allowed for students of different cultural and academic backgrounds to use their own strengths and rely on the strengths of their peers and mentors to learn and complete difficult group tasks. There are two big challenges. One challenge we are encountering is the time needed for the group projects. Obviously two weeks' summer time is too short. Another challenge for our research is to see the continued development of students' identity and self-efficacy after the summer camp. Although we continued to offer a Saturday STEM program, not many students continued their study. It is important we get some funding to encourage students to continue the program so that we can see the impacts on their STEM knowledge and skills and identity and self-efficacy. Thank you for your question, Scott. 

It was great to learn more about this project and to see the robots created by the girls. I could easily see how the girls engaged in the "computing" part of the program. I was wondering--how did you teach about the "ubiquitous intelligence" component of the program? Because AI is increasingly present in our society, I'd love to hear if your project had ideas for teaching literacy (or critical literacy) relative to all of the applications of programming and machine learning that are around us on a daily basis. Thanks again for your innovative work.

What an engaging project - and I predict that this will have an impact on what some of these students choose to pursue in terms of education and careers.  Thanks for sharing.

Great for improving Nevada K-12 STEM education

This is a great opportunity for a lot of girls, great idea!! Will truly encourage and inspire young girls in Las Vegas.

Great project! We need more of this! 

Hi, I was wondering if you included any ethics training or discussion in your curriculum? Things like a smart attendance system, for example, might raise these kinds of questions.

Loved the tiered mentoring approach!

This is a great project to address STEM equity! We need more projects like this!

An encouraging project for STEM fellows!

It is so nice to see support for underrepresented groups in our community! Congratulations on your work! I am sure the students had fun doing the projects.

So much fun creating the solar house. Girls had a great time.