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October 2009

From the Director

In the last 6 months, many projects at the Center have gone from plans on the table top to reality.  One of our graduate students (Morgan Hynes) successfully became the first engineering education PhD.  He is now helping me run the research side of the Center and writing a lot of grant proposals.  Most of the PhD students defended their thesis proposals, the last hurdle before actually taking the final data set and writing a thesis.  They aim to graduate somewhere in the next 16 months.  LabVIEW Education Edition (LVEE) was shipped out last month and will appear on shelves at the end of October.  This is part of a joint venture between Vernier Software, National Instruments, and the CEEO to develop a robotics and data analysis language for the high school.  We developed a new joystick application for teaching math and robotics for LEGO Education North America.  Our stop action movie work (SAM) now will be part of a new book from Klutz books and we are finalizing a version that will be sold as well as one that is free off the web.  Robobooks (version 1) will be completed by December. So all in all, things are rather exciting at the moment.

Over the course of the next 6 months, we have many new exciting things planned, from the start of the ski season to developing new hardware that will allow high schoolers to learn electronics.  In the meantime I hope you enjoy the newsletter - there is a lot happening. - Chris

Universal Design for Learning with CAST Grant

The CEEO was recently awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a nonprofit research and development organization located in Wakefield, MA.  CAST works to expand learning opportunities, especially for those with disabilities, by building educational environments based on their framework of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

The collaborative effort is a two-year pilot study to first incorporate UDL supports into the RoboBooks platform (year one) and then develop and deploy science activities in the RoboBook format to high school students studying in the Boston Arts Academy and the Fenway High School, both Boston Public Schools (year two).  RoboBooks is an on-going project at the CEEO for developing interactive digital workbooks combining hardware, software, and activities/curriculum into one.  Currently the development of the RoboBooks software is sponsored by industry (a LEGO research sponsored agreement) and another NSF grant, but this new opportunity directly allows the team to expand the functionality and open up the capabilities of the software for addressing a wider range of learners.

CAST, founded in 1984, has worked for many years in the field of developing technologies, supports, and instructional materials that specifically address the needs of students with disabilities.  For this project, the research will focus on investigating the impact the new RoboBook advancements on the learning and engagement of students with high incidence disabilities (learning disabilities, behavioral/emotional disorders, and mild mental retardation).

Examples of UDL supports enhancing “The Call of the Wild”

Recently teaming with Google on The Literacy Project, CAST has been adding UDL supports to online distributions of books (see “The Call of the Wild” example).  In much the same way, the CEEO and CAST collaboration is looking to add similar embedded supports to chemistry and physics activities within the RoboBook environment: text-to-speech capabilities, concept maps/graphic organizers, vocabulary support, and highlighting of key science concepts to name a few.

For more information about CAST and UDL, visit http://cast.org/research/udl/

New Software: LabVIEW Education Edition

The Center has been working closely with National Instruments in cooperative development of a new software product: LabVIEW Education Edition (LVEE).  This new product consists of several educational toolkits for use with the National Instruments LabVIEW software. Targeted at high school students with little or no programming experience, LVEE provides an entry point to the industry standard, fully functional LabVIEW programming environment.

The primary focus this past year has been improving the existing LabVIEW tools available for programming the LEGO MindStorms NXT. The Center has leveraged its considerable experience with the NXT as an educational platform to guide the development of the new "NXT Module 2009", the main component of LVEE. The NXT Module abstracts the technical details of programming while promoting accessibility and facilitating the rapid prototyping of intelligent LEGO Robots. It features an improved debugging experience, a simpler interface to the NXT, and a more consistent user experience.  Additionally, the CEEO has created extensive new help, examples, and sample code to get kids started using the functionalities developed in concert with National Instruments.  LabVIEW Education Edition will also provide curricular content with accompanying support for other third party educational technologies.

Ethan Searl and Melissa Pickering prepping for the LVEE teacher workshop at NI Week in August.

To gain a first-hand look of students and teachers using LabVIEW for Education Edition (LVEE) in the classroom, the CEEO is assisting LEGO Education North America and National Instruments with a market research study this fall.  Nine high school teachers from across the nation are participating in the study, using LVEE with the MINDSTORMS and TETRIX hardware.  The CEEO is developing the activity units that the teachers will be following, but the teachers are also encouraged to come up with their own activities at the end of the project.  These robotic themed activity units will be available for free for teachers to download and use in the classroom with LVEE by this winter.

Summer at the CEEO

In academia it’s almost always a given that summers are slower; the CEEO, however, makes the exception.  There is a seamless transition between the CEEO’s academic and summer months, with the hustle and bustle of undergraduate STOMP students giving way to the younger and older generations of summer LEGO Camp goers and teacher trainees. 

June kicked off with the 3rd Annual LEGO Engineering Symposium, attracting over 80 educators from around the world for two days to explore unique methods of integrating LEGO robotics into the classroom to attract more diverse learners, particularly girls.  Through hands-on development labs, fellow teacher presentations, and informal networking, attendees gained inspiration for new teaching methods to take back to their classrooms.  Conclusions from the development labs can be found here.

June closed with yet another teacher gathering, hosted by I-Robot in Bedford, MA, with the CEEO facilitating one of the 4 hands-on workshops over the course of 2 days.  The event, attracting 50 teachers from around Massachusetts, was titled STREAM to inspire high school teachers to use robotics in teaching science, technology, engineering, and math.  The CEEO was honored to be one of the invited facilitators, and continues to collaborate with I-Robot in their outreach efforts.

As if it wasn’t hot enough in Boston in August, a large CEEO crew traveled to Austin, Texas to lead a hands-on teacher workshop using the beta version of LabVIEW Education Edition (LVEE).  This workshop, attended by 20 high school teachers, marked the kickoff to a market research project that Tufts, National Instruments, and LEGO North American are implementing this fall with LVEE in 8 US high school classrooms.  Not being able to escape the south, the CEEO was then invited to present at LEGO Education North America’s first annual partner summit in Pittsburg, KS.  Here, the CEEO was able to give an update on its research, outreach, and technology projects to the LEGO sales team, as well as other partner invitees such as Carnegie Mellon, Intel, FIRST, Vernier, High Technic, and National Instruments. 

STOMP Google Training

CEEO presentations and workshops continued across the nation in August, with the launch of a pilot I-STOMP at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.  On August 24th, the CEEO facilitated a LEGO Engineering conference for the participating STOMP teachers, Google STOMP engineer volunteers, and other bay area teachers.  The conference adequately prepped the STOMP teachers, and Google employees have already started to visit the fifth grade classrooms at Bishop Elementary in Mountain View.  If the pilot STOMP at Google goes well this fall, then the program will expand in the spring and next year to additional grades and schools in Mountain View. Across the country in Boston, additional I-STOMP pilots are happening this fall, with GE – Aviation engineers visiting fifth grade classrooms in Lynn, and Foster-Miller engineers visiting fifth grade classrooms in Waltham. The Foster-Miller engineers will be joining the

Symantec engineers who have one year’s of STOMP experience under their belts. The CEEO closed out the summer with trainings for all new Boston-area I-STOMP teachers and engineers.  It was certainly a busy summer for the CEEO – both locally and nationally.

Visiting Scholar: Janet Kolodner

I am a Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and I am visiting the CEEO this year.  I am founding Editor in Chief of Journal of the Learning Sciences and a founder and first Executive Officer of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. My research for the past 30 has addressed a wide variety of issues in learning, memory, and problem solving, both in computers and in people. During the 1980’s, I pioneered the computer method called case-based reasoning, which allows a computer to reason and learn from its experiences. The first case-based design aids (CBDAs) came from my lab. Archie-2, for example, helped architecture students with conceptual design. During the early 1990’s, I used the cognitive model implied by case-based reasoning to address issues in creative design. The computer program called Julia planned meals. Creative Julia figured out what to do with leftover rice, and ALEC simulated Alexander Graham Bell in his invention of the telephone.

Janet Kolodner

Later in the 1990s, I began using the cognitive model implied by case-based reasoning to guide design of science curriculum for middle school. Learning by Design™ is a design-based learning approach and an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to science learning that has children learn science from their design experiences. The sequencing of activities in the classroom encourages students to reflect on their design and science experiences in ways that CBR says are appropriate for integrating them well into memory. LBD curriculum units and the sequencing structures in LBD are integrated into a full 3-year middle-school science curriculum called Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS), available from the publisher It’s About Time. More recently, my research uses what I learned in designing LBD to create informal learning environments to help middle schoolers come to think of themselves as competent scientific reasoners. In Kitchen Science Investigators, 5th and 6th graders learn science in the context of cooking. In Hovering Around, they learn about motion and forces, air flow, and how to explain in the context of designing hovercraft. 

I gave up editorship of JLS at the end of 2008, and my curriculum project has come to a close, so I am ready for new intellectual adventures, and that is why I am on sabbatical. I am visiting three places on my sabbatical – Tufts CEEO, MIT Media Lab (with Mitchel Resnick), and the Museum of Science (with Christine Cunningham). My goal is to learn more about elementary school students and elementary school science, to learn more about the technologies CEEO and the folks at the Media Lab are using, and to learn more about ins and outs of informal science education.

My goal for the next part of my career is help as many young learners as I can learn to think scientifically, value scientific and technological knowledge, and become comfortable scientific and technological thinkers. During the coming year, I aim to figure out how to pursue this goal – middle school informal education like I am doing with cooking? Elementary science, and if so, what is my shtick? Using Scratch to help kids reason computationally? There are all kinds of things I could do; I am looking to identify the most fruitful.  I will also be spending a lot of time continuing to work with my publisher to support continuing revision and successful adoptions of PBIS, my middle school science curriculum.

There are many things I enjoy doing when I am not working (but I work a lot). I read the New York Times almost every day, and I try to do the crossword puzzles. I knit and crochet, read cooking magazines and cookbooks, triyng out existing recipes and creating new ones. I drink a lot of decaf grande non-fat no-foam lattes at Starbucks, and I am trying out the many local coffee shops in Cambridge to see if I can do better. I like the symphony, and I like to go to plays.

New CEEO Graduate Students

Amber Kendall

Amber and Jumbo

I consider myself to be both a scientist and a teacher.  I started my schooling with a BA in Physics at NC State University.  After graduating I made the move to Boston to study astronomy, but left after a year to teach 9th-grade Conceptual Physics at a local high school.  After three years of teaching I was sure that I wanted to make a career modification from science to science education.  I started to call it a "career shift" but really, in education I'm thinking about many of the same concepts and using many of the same techniques from my undergraduate science training.  I am intrigued by the proposition to use the engineering design process to engage learners of all ages in wrestling with mathematical and scientific concepts.  Along that vein I am working on the NSF Reese-funded Elementary LEGO Science project here at the CEEO as a research assistant. Engineering education is just one of the many things I'm immersing myself in this year at Tufts; I am also collaborating with the Wright Center for Science Education on issues of

astronomy education and scale, and I am taking as many different classes on learning and education as I can fit into my schedule.  I am pursuing a master's degree in the MSTE program through the Education Department, and after graduating I hope to work with science education outreach programs and eventually get my PhD.

Elsa Head

I grew up in Hopkinton, New Hampshire and originally decided to come to Tufts as an undergraduate to live near a city and study Engineering. I graduated from Tufts Undergraduate School of Engineering in the spring of 2009 with a Bachelors degree in Engineering Science and Environmental Studies. I decided to stay at Tufts for my master's degree because of my experience working as a STOMP fellow. Starting this September, I became a Masters student in the Math, Science, Technology, and Engineering Education (MSTE) program at Tufts University I worked at the CEEO as a STOMP fellow for the past three years. In addition to my previous STOMP work, I worked at the CEEO for the summer of 2008 helping to develop the STOMP Network and curriculum tools. When I am not at the CEEO, I enjoy being outdoors, doing yoga, and hanging out with friends and family.

Upcoming Events

In this Edition

From the Director

New Grant: CAST

New Software: LabVIEW for Eduction Edition

Visiting Scholar Spotlight: Janet Kolodner

New Graduate Student Spotlight

Summer at the CEEO

Upcoming Events