Research Ideas
According to economist and researchers, as the United States moves into an innovation economy value will be placed not on technical skills alone but the ability to creatively solve problems and having a thorough knowledge of advanced technology concepts (Araya, 2010; Sawyer, 2006). I hypothesize the way to fulfill the creative cognitive processing needed in an innovation economy, will be through participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from a diversity of perspectives and experiences. My research interests align with the goal of increasing STEM participation in underrepresented groups, which I refer to as STEM inclusion. Underrepresented groups include women, girls, and minorities. My research investigates how creative learning experiences can engage underrepresented populations in STEM through creativity, self-expression, and construction. My conjecture is through creative STEM learning experiences built upon the ideas of constructionism, we can engage these groups into more STEM activities and foster the environments for developing creative learning ideas.
This is a subject matter that is close to my heart. As an African American woman interested in STEM, I often felt excluded from the traditional STEM community. Aside from being a minority and a woman in the STEM fields, my interest in blending art with STEM also made me an outlier. I didn’t discover a context that blended art and technology together until I found maker education, after graduation from undergraduate studies. That inspired me to research maker education and how this field could be used to increase STEM inclusion.
In doing research on maker education, I discovered the professor Seymour Papert and his learning theory of constructionism. Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez regard Seymour Papert as the “father of the modern maker educational movement” (Martinez & Stager, 2013). I use Papert’s constructionism as the theoretical foundation for my research. Constructionism is an extension of Piaget’s Constructivism. Constructivism states that individuals construct their own learning (Ackermann, 2001). Constructionism adds the addendum that individuals learn better when we construction something (Papert & Harel, 1991).
As a design approach, I’m inspired by Papert’s vision of computational thinking and the potential advances this approach can have on youth learning. Papert’s view of computational thinking is based on using the computer and its manipulation as a medium making abstract concepts concrete. Papert’s view of computational thinking differs from modern approaches to computational thinking in its favor of debugging as a learning process. According to Brian Silverman during the Thinking About Thinking About Seymour event, he states that the main difference between to two concepts is the value of this process of debugging (Lab, 2017). Implying that current computational thinking models prefer a method based instructionism, a term Papert used to describe a top-down approach to teaching and instruction where the lesson is to be taught, mastered, and evaluated, versus constructionism where the skill of computational thinking is a part of the process but not the intended goal (Papert, 1991).
The goal of my research is to investigate approaches to STEM inclusion via the creative learning experience, develop models of STEM inclusion based on the creative learning experience, and the evaluation of those models through design interventions. I plan to investigate using a constructionist approach to the creative learning experience as a method to STEM inclusion. This approach I’m calling computational crafting. It is an approach taking design principles from Papert’s vision of computational thinking, design principles based on innovative approaches to STEM interventions such as craft technology, and diversity and inclusion theory. Lastly, I’ll evaluate the validity and credibility of the model using a design-based methodology.
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The purpose of this research is to investigate ways to increase STEM inclusion for all groups using creative technology approaches. I believe it can be done through a constructionist approach and novel learning experiences. I think focusing on Papert’s vision of computational thinking is one way we can achieve this. I aspire to focus my research on exploring the relationship between these concepts. If they are deemed credible, we move one step closer to increasing STEM inclusion for an increasingly technological world.
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Below are the research questions I will posit for this investigation:
How can we create learning experiences that engage underrepresented groups in STEM using creative, self-expression, and construction?
What are the current perspectives of Papert’s vision of computational thinking?
What design principles from Papert’s computational thinking advance learning experiences that increase STEM inclusion?
What elements of diversity and inclusion theories address STEM inclusion?
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References
Ackermann, E. (2001). Piaget’s constructivism, Papert’s constructionism: What’s the difference? Future of Learning Group Publication, 5(3), 1–11.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjo.2012.02.003
Araya, D. (2010). Educational policy in the creative economy. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of
Innovation, 3–28.
MIT Media Lab. (2017). Thinking About Thinking About Seymour. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=ZXDgJ6bHo8o
Martinez, S. L., & Stager, G. (2013). Invent to learn: Making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom. Torrance, CA: Constructing modern
knowledge press.
Papert, S. (1991). Perestroika and epistemological politics. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism. (pp. 13–27). Westport, CT: Ablex
Publishing. Retrieved from http://proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&
AN=1991-99006-001&site=eds-live
Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism: research reports and essays, 1985-1990 (pp.
1–13). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp. Retrieved from http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/tlr53&id=1052&div=&
collection=journals
Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Educating for innovation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 1(1), 41–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2005.08.001
