STUDIO is designed to run quarter-long STEM curricula developed by graduate students from the College of Education in cooperation with Neighborhood House staff and undergraduate mentors chosen from across the University of Washington.

In the video, the youth are celebrating the results of their hard work by sharing their creations through Showcase. High schoolers designed and coded robots while middle schoolers followed a variation of Katie Headrick Taylor's Mobile City Science curriculum that infused immersive VR, and AR location-aware technologies as part of a participatory neighborhood mapping project. Youth created their own VR-enabled spaces using imagery taken from a variety of locations around their community and implemented using CoSpaces and Google Street View. A blockly-like programming language enabled youth to program imaginary scenes into the virtual landscape. Youth published their virtual images to Google Earth which they later encountered in VR walks. Throughout, youth traced paths through the city and inscribed them onto digital maps. A collaborative Google map was used to place their re-designed places, record their paths, and re-imagine the landscape of their community. 

The voices of youth and mentors in this video were so compelling and heartfelt, and it was clear that this project means a great deal to those who are involved in it.

It would be great to see and hear more about the kinds of projects that the youth and mentors were involved in, some of which you describe a bit in the post above. You also mention leadership development and social/emotional learning, and I was wondering how those are incorporated.

I was also curious to hear more about how you are capturing the impacts of this program on both youth and mentors.

Thanks,
Billy

Thank you for the comments and interests in STUDIO! 

On projects that youth and mentors are involved in- What Erin described above is an example of graduate student/staffs (at NH) designed and facilitated projects. There are different quarter-long projects that involve more undergraduate mentor input.  At the end of each quarter (with exception of fall), we take youth interest survey on what they want to explore and learn in STEAM, and staffs, graduate students, and undergraduate mentors design projets-based learning curricula based on the results of the survey. We usually run one project per quarter, but when we have run multiple projects per quarter, youth can pick their first, second, and third choices. We make sure that youth either get first or second choices in each quarter. For example, in Winter 2018, middle school youth expressed interest in learning about general school science, and 2 experienced undergraduate mentors (with over 5 quarters of participation) and myself designed Food science curriculum called World through Food. It aimed to connect the mentors' expertise (Biology majors) and youth's interest to explore further in what they learn in school while including hands-on activities(e.g. cooking), and sense-making activities (e.g. exploring how and why ground meat gets sticky as they handle mixture). During the fall quarters, we have more short activities (e.g. scribbling machine, paper circuits) to get mentors and youth more familiar with tinkering and routine/structure of STUDIO. 

On social/emotional learning and leadership programs, Neighborhood House staff and UW graduate students have co-designed 6-weeks long curriculum on self-awareness and compassion. Activities involved reading poems together to reflect on how self-compassion looks like in youth's and mentor's lives, and creating plaster cast of their faces to express the dichotomy between what we feel inside and what we think others perceive us by painting outside and the inside of the cast. 

Recruiting Mentors- We recruit only during fall and winter quarters because we require the mentors to participate at least two quarters. We believe that time is important for youth and mentors to build relationships. We recruit university-wide (via adviser emails, in person advertisement (e.g. STEM and education classes, and clubs), and through connections with existing mentors. Returning mentors recruit their friends and that way, we were able to recruit mentors who are open-minded, and interested in STEM mentoring. We also have an initial orientation (4hour long) and survey to inform the new mentors about our commitments, purpose, and expectation. 

 

Thank you! 

Jiyoung 

 

Thank you for sharing your project!  It was wonderful to hear from participants and stakeholders who play different roles in STUDIO.  I was wondering if you could speak more about the design and impact of the STUDIO program model -- what elements have you found to be the most important for creating this rich community space for youth development and STEM learning? And, what challenges have you encountered when working to build this community?  Thanks!

Thanks for the posts describing your recruitment strategies for both youth and mentors. Given that Neighborhood House has such a long history in the community, are there any practices in place for longitudinal studies to follow the life or career trajectories of participants?

Looking forward to hearing more!

Margaret

What an incredible video and program!

I love that there is a nurturing of mentor-mentee relationships and that the students view their community critically and think about how they might like to see it changed. A colleague at WCS created software for New Yorkers to also re-imagine their city-scale called Visonmaker. 

Can I access the VR worlds that the students created? I'd love to see what they look like.

 Hi Jason, Visionmaker looks amazing! I look forward to trying it out. So sorry for the delay to your question. It prompted me to think about the best way to share one part of what the students made – and it just occurred to me how to do it.

Here is a link of one part of the youths' collaborative map which includes their placed virtual locations & QR code. Download the CoSpaces app on your phone to view (a cardboard viewer is recommended for VR). 

Wow, your video is polished and captivating. Really enjoyed hearing the young man's experience in his own words about his relationships with mentors. Can you tell us a bit more about the resources you leveraged to make the video? It's clearly a professional job, how big was the crew? Did the students shoot some video themselves? What was your timeline like for pre-production? Budget? What kind of resources would someone need to put together a video of this caliber? It's so well done, great work!

-Kristana

Very compelling program! Are you also tracking the impact of your program on the undergraduate mentors? 

I really enjoyed this video, the experience must be rewarding for all involved--the youth, the mentors, and the curriculum designers. I was wondering if you could speak to how input and innovation on the part of the youth feeds back into the curriculum design?

This combination of in-person mentoring and technology exploration is very powerful. Is there an element of this initiative to provide education/career pathways related to STEM? 

Very interested by the use of mapping in this kind of collaborative engagement with cityscapes.  Have you tried mobile apps like Track Kit (the only one i've played with), or does it work better for them to actually inscribe their pathways and then transfer to digital representation?