Thanks so much for watching our video! We welcome your comments. One conversation we would like to have is about the kinds of partnerships informal STEM programs can develop (such as with higher ed institutions, but other organizations as well) that can help youth succeed along education and career pathways. If you are engaged in such efforts, please share what you are doing to establish those relationships.

Intriguing work, thanks for an interesting video. 

    You mention a bit about the impact that the portfolio has on the students' sense of accomplishment, and the partnership that's doing this work helps create a sense of reality for them about the value of the skills they're learning.  Have you followed some of your "alums" into their post-secondary lives, to understand how their experience in your program affects [a] selection of further trainiing, [b] success in applications to college (or other post-secondary) opportunities; [c] actual effects on learning or professional growth in post-secondary settings (I am being generic, since I can imagine that the pathways from this program may be quite various!).

This sounds like a really valuable partnership to all the organizations involved. I was intrigued by the visioning session you described, which led to shared values for the partnerships. How was that session facilitated? How have the partners returned to those values throughout the project? Have they changed at all over time? 

Thanks for your comments! Brian, the team has maintained relationships with some alums, one of whom goes to Parsons and who speaks in the video. However, we would like to do more follow up with them in the next phase of the project. Our final interviews with participants will be focused on applying to college so we'll know more in a month or so, and we hope to do future project that will allow up to keep in touch with students as they move on to college.

Hi Alice! Thanks for your question. Our excellent evaluator Julie Poncelet facilitated the visioning session, which was extremely helpful to get us all on the same page. it was done at all day retreat where we had to identify core values, inputs and outputs and anticipated outcomes. Lots of colored post-its. Then Julie created a document that synthesized our vision. It has been useful to have that to go back to as we go through the day to day program and research activities. I'll ask Julie is she wants to chime in.

Very interesting work! Could you describe a bit more about the badging program and how it relates to the portfolios? What platform did you decide to use for the badges? I know that it can be challenging to develop badges that are sufficiently specific and yet widely recognized.

I'm also curious to know more about how students are awarded badges.  I read that the badges are curated by students, but do instructors hand out the badges at the end of a project and are there detailed learning objectives associated with each badge?  Have you ever awarded badges for projects students have done outside of the classroom/mouse setting?  Thank you for sharing your work!

 We considered the use of digital badges for students and also for teachers within our Learning by Making program, as we concentrate on several important skills that would be good to recognize in some way. But because we are part of the formal learning framework, it was hard to justify another way of grading the students besides just giving them grades, and having them create projects for portfolio-type assessment.

I love the emphasis on meeting societal needs - I also teach a class that originates with an NSF grant that is for sophomore college students that uses our new campus Makerspace to create things needed by community partners. Maybe we will make next year's video about that project!

Great discussion above! Great project. Love the combination of design work, engineering, digital badges, and altruism embedded in the project. Thanks for the great work!