Katrina Schwartz

It’s a common refrain that there aren’t enough women in jobs that require math and science skills like engineering and computer science. Though more programs are cropping up geared towards girls involved in science through camps, rocketry clubs or with more focused courses on STEM subjects, the gender imbalance is still striking.

The discrepancy became all-too apparent to Debbie Sterling, a budding inventor who was one of the only girls in her engineering courses at Stanford. So she came up with an idea to encourage more girls in  is why she’s spent the last several years developing GoldieBlox, a toy focused on developing spatial skills in girls.

“I just think there need to be more options, more role models, more career paths for girls to see and that’s what I’m trying to do with GoldieBlox,” Sterling said.

Sterling discovered her interest in engineering almost by accident — a math teacher suggested she take a course when she got to college — and she wonders if girls would choose science careers if they were exposed to basic engineering and physics concepts earlier in life.

Research shows that building toys like Legos or Erector Sets are good for building spatial skills, but those typically fall under the stereotype of toys for boys. After visiting the toy store and experiencing what she called “the pink explosion isle for girls” Sterling decided she needed to build an engineering toy that would appeal to girls.

GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine is a construction kit with pieces that clip into a board to make a simple belt drive. The set comes with a story that tells of a girl engineer named Goldie who wants to build a spinning machine so all her friends can spin together. She takes apart a jewelry box to learn about the spinning mechanism and then builds her own.

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“My ‘ah ha’ moment was that instead of a construction toy only, which is spatial skills and object play, I would combine spatial skills with verbal, so I would have the construction toy plus the book,” Sterling said. “By introducing the story of Goldie and these characters, and building for a reason, it gave girls the context they were craving and the narrative behind the play that was meaningful to them.”

She came up with the idea of her hybrid story-building toy by observing that girls prefer narrative-based play. She hoped she could draw girls in with a story and after directing them to follow along with Goldie as she builds, they’d get comfortable tinkering with the construction kit. Once they’re comfortable with the parts and how they work, the hope is that they begin to design their own machines.

“Some modeling of a cool, young girl engineer could be useful if the girl playing can see a path from where she is to where the cool, functioning engineer is,” said Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She said the connection between the toy and engineering needs to be clear and that the hands on-skills girls learn at young ages need to be continual reinforcement for the effects to last.

Goldie can be a role model to younger girls, while the inventor herself can model what a successful female engineer looks like to older girls. “She’s not the kid genius,” Sterling said describing Goldie. “She’s well liked; she’s fun; she’s quirky; she’s a little messy. I guess that is a bit like me.”

Sterling said in its early days the toy has been very popular with engineering parents. “It touched my heart that it was a mechanical toy that was targeted towards young girls,” said Martin Miller, an engineer who pre-ordered GoldieBlox for his six-year-old daughter Kaitlin when the toy appeared on Kickstarter. “That’s unusual and I felt that was perfect for my little daughter.” Kaitlin has two older brothers and Miller considers a tomboy, so he thought she’d like a building toy. She has also already begun to play with the characters off the board, imagining scenes for Goldie and her friends.

Sterling hoped her toy would inspire creative play and was also aware of research like Carol Dweck’s that shows kids need to learn to struggle with difficult concepts so they know how to tackle setbacks in the future.

“From a very young age I would start stressing the fun and interestingness of difficult tasks,” Dweck said. “When something is easy I’d say, ‘oh that’s boring, that’s a waste of time.’”

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In the first draft of the story, Sterling had Goldie build a machine that didn’t work. But when Sterling tested the story line, girls and their parents got so frustrated that the machine didn’t work that they refused to turn the page and continue. So Sterling softened the failure.

“I have a moment where Goldie is perplexed,” she said. “So I don’t set anyone up for failure, but I show that she’s confused and she doesn’t know the answers and she goes through a series of funny moments where she tries a bunch of things until she finally works it out.”

That strategy is in line with Dweck’s research on how to keep kids striving for challenging tasks. “If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, part of building and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next — that’s really useful,” Dweck said.

Some specialty toy stores are already stocking GoldieBlox after the Kickstarter campaign Sterling launched to fund manufacturing went viral and more than doubled its goal. “From the very beginning I knew I wanted this girl character sitting on the shelf next to Bob the Builder and Thomas the Train,” Sterling said.

The game costs $29.99 and the three additional story lines and accompanying kits that Sterling is working on will likely have similar price tags.

Sterling wants the toy to be inclusive, unlike her experiences in engineering classes at Stanford, where most of her professors were men and she often felt her ideas were discounted. “I want everybody to get to have fun with engineering and I think that by doing it in this very accessible way that no one has to feel like they don’t belong,” she said.

Flickr: Ganesha Isis

A consortium of science and education organizations has released the first set of science standards since the original set prepared by the National Research Council and the American Association for Advancement in Science 15 years ago. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) aim to incorporate the scientific community’s understanding of science as it has grown and changed.

The new NGSS standards represent the core scientific concepts that practicing scientists agree K-12 students should know by the time they graduate. The framework for the standards was developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve. Together they built compiled principals and solicited input from states about what pedagogy and curricular specifics to build in.

“Students need to understand how science works, the practices and the crosscutting concepts in order to be ready to assume their roles in a scientifically complex world,” said Frank Neipold, co-chair of the Climate Education Interagency Working Group at the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Neipold has worked on the standards in many capacities and sees them as vitally important to educating the next generation to think critically about how systems work together.

Twenty-six states helped write the standards, and while there is no obligation that states adopt them, many likely will. The standards focus on fewer core concepts, are meant to go deeper within each concept, and emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of science.

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The standards are organized in three dimensions: key concepts, crosscutting concepts, and practices. Key concepts are broadly important and teachable over a series of years, such as the subject of climate change, which can get more complex as students build upon their knowledge. The second dimension is crosscutting concepts, things that span the scientific disciplines like energy and matter, cause and effect or systems. Lastly, students will be expected to understand the practice of science, undertaking scientific inquiry and comparing the practices of science with those of engineers.

“The interesting and important part of the NGSS is that they really are about critical thinking in these cross cutting competencies,” said Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and leader of a project to implement the standards in Maryland and Delaware. “So I think teachers will really have the chance to help students think critically about these topics.”

While the NGSS are not part of the Common Core State Standards — those were developed under the auspices of federal government and focus only on math and literacy — there are some similarities. Proponents of both sets of standards say they’re meant to emphasize close reading of non-fiction tests, performance-based standards, and an integrated approach to learning across disciplines.

CLIMATE CHANGE INCLUDED

One of the more controversial aspects of the new science standards is the inclusion of climate change in the curriculum. “There was never a debate about whether climate change would be in there,” Heidi Schweingruber of the National Research Council told National Public Radio. “It is a fundamental part of science, and so that’s what our work is based on, the scientific consensus.”

Still, science teachers often find themselves pulled in to help bolster math and reading scores, leaving them with little time to teach science, let alone incorporate complicated new topics. Teaching climate change science can feel daunting to many teachers who don’t have a firm grasp of all the information, he said.

“We have not trained our teachers very well to work across disciplines,” Boesch said. Teaching climate change inherently requires integration of things like earth sciences, chemistry and systems. A changing climate will affect all parts of life. Teachers aren’t always comfortable teaching all the elements and will need to be trained.

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The standards are meant to lead the student through a progression of concepts, providing building blocks early on that can scaffold more complicated concepts in higher grades.

“We as a nation have a real deep and multidimensional problem on our hands that has to involve education of our young people,” said Boesch on the subject of climate change. “We need to equip people to have the skills as well as the knowledge to deal with it.”

The new standards will also require a whole new emphasis on revamping science textbooks. “A lot of materials out there are sub-par,” Neipold said.

“Climate change is not a political issue and it’s not a debate,” said Mario Molina, deputy director for the Alliance for Climate Education. “It’s science, strongly researched and thoroughly vetted science. So our hope is that teachers will not see this as political debate.” He believes students have the right to study climate change as it unfolds, as well as solutions to the problem.

Hampstead Academy students

Responding to worries that school is not preparing students for the jobs of the future, there’s been a concerted effort lately to emphasize the importance of learning STEM subjects.

President Obama made a pitch for STEM in his State of the Union address this year saying, “we’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math — the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future.”
Congressman Mike Honda from California recently introduced two pieces of legislation to Congress focusing on STEM: One would create an office of STEM education to help coordinate between schools, while simultaneously creating a research arm to fund development of education technology; the other bill would offer in-house STEM coaches to schools, helping them integrate concepts into the curriculum.

Some schools are already integrating STEM throughout their curriculum. A team of eighth graders at Hampstead Academy, one of 10 winners of the Verizon Innovative App Challenge, for example designed Chow Checker, an app to help people identify ingredients they are allergic to in food. The app allows users to either scan the bar code on a food item or use the search bar to find an item. Any ingredients the user has an allergy to shows up in red. The app also has a news feed and a personal profile, giving it the feel of a social networking site, a feature that also sets it apart from other food allergy apps. The news feed gives people who suffer from food allergies a way to share their personal experiences with one another, said student Sarah Miller-Bartley.

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“We wanted customers to relate to the app and have fun when they use it,” said Rachel Fonseca, another student. “It’s supposed to be a customer friendly experience.”

As part of their school work, the team conducted research on existing products in their market, and determined that, although there are a few similar apps, many had poor user reviews and crashed a lot. Their conclusion: They were confident they could design something better.

Now the students will have the chance to put their design into practice, working with MIT Media Lab’s App Inventor Training Corps to write the code and develop their product. The MIT specialists will visit Hampstead for a day and a half of consultation, then the students will be on their own, left to do the heavy lifting of making the app a reality.

“The students are owning this start to finish,” said Christina DiMicelli, the technology integration specialist at Hampstead Academy.

“We all have our nervousness,” said Nathan Stallings, a student designer. “We fear that it won’t come out the way we pictured it.”

But they’re also excited that they’ll have a real product at the end of this project. “This is very different from other school projects because it’s a real world thing,” said Jack Lawlor. “The app is going to be out in the world helping people.”

Hampstead Academy is a small private school focusing on “whole child” education, and many of the school projects are cross-curricular and include technology. But this project felt more personal to the students. “The app challenge felt a little different because we all really love technology and we were really in our element,” Fonseca said.

One of the most challenging parts of this project was working together, students said — a true reflection of what happens in the real world. Students Ashvi Patel and Ethan Calandra said that coming up with a cohesive idea that satisfied every team member was hard, especially when they had to let some ideas go.

Most of the students enjoyed designing the app itself and thinking about how the end user would approach it. A few students even think they might like to continue to study app development. “Now that I’ve seen the final product I am more interested in pursuing it,” said Alex Mielens who had studied some code before, but found it boring when it wasn’t attached to a specific goal.

The Hampstead team developed the project as part of social studies class, organized by teacher, Chris Sousa, who finds it perfectly natural to incorporate STEM into his class. “When you can start applying STEM to social problems that fits right into social studies,” Sousa said.

Chow Checker will be available for download on Google Play this summer.

SimCity

As game-based learning gains momentum in education circles, teachers increasingly want substantive proof that games are helpful for learning. The game-makers at the non-profit GlassLab are hoping to do this with the popular video game SimCity.

GlassLab is working with commercial game companies, assessment experts, and those versed in digital classrooms to build SimCityEDU, a downloadable game designed for sixth graders. Scheduled to be be released in the fall of 2013, it builds on SimCity’s city management theme, but provides specific challenges to players in the subject of STEM.

“The big pain point we’ve heard from teachers is that they cannot entertain their kids to the level that they are being entertained outside of the classroom,” said Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab. “They want to be able to create meaningful learning experiences and they just can’t compete with the digital tools their kids are accessing all the time.”

Teachers have been using the commercial version of SimCity as a classroom tool for a long time, but with the newest version recently released and the EDU version soon to follow, GlassLab is trying to convene an online community of educators already working in the space, asking them to think creatively about what the game could do, offering lesson plans, and helping teachers to collaborate and share ideas.

SimCityEDU grew out of research conducted by the MacArthur foundation on how gaming can mirror formative assessments [PDF] – measuring understanding regularly along the learning path, rather than occasionally or at the end of a unit, as is most common. Their research found that games gather data about the player as he or she makes choices within the game, affecting the outcome. In games, players “level-up,” moving on to higher levels when they’ve mastered the necessary skills; similarly teachers scaffold lessons to deepen understanding as a student grasps the easier concepts.

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SimCityEDU, funded by the Gates and Macarthur foundations, will provide assessments that are aligned with Common Core State Standards. The EDU version uses the same code as the commercial game, but with the addition of using students’ choices during challenges as a method of assessment. GlassLab is still working to develop all the challenges based on focus-group feedback on student interests, but the one challenge they know they’ll include focuses on the environment, based on positive feedback from the focus groups.

“These kids are fascinated by the environment,” Lindl said.

Students will be asked to conduct interviews and look at research to determine what kind of power plant to build in the town. As they play, taking photo documentation, interpreting the information they’ve gathered, drawing conclusions, graphing the data and finally making a decision, the game assesses each choice. Teachers will have a tool to see how each child’s play matches up against Common Core standards.

And game developers hope that the incremental data will help teachers know when to step in and offer more help. For example, if an interview contradicts scientific evidence, the student will have to discern bias, figure out how to weight the various pieces of evidence differently, and back up conclusions with data and text.

SimCityEDU will not go to market until third-party assessor, SRI International, has validated by testing students who’ve played the game using a completely different assessment tool to ensure the game works.

FOCUSED LEARNING VS. EXPLORATION

GlassLab plans to offer the downloadable game at little to no cost for schools and teachers, Lindl said. However, the clear narrative and objectives within SimCityEDU depart from other commercial games that have been appropriated by teachers — like Minecraft. That game offers a free-form experience that teachers can easily manipulate to serve their lessons, a quality many teachers like.

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“We want teachers to be able to choose between a free exploration or something more focused,” Lindl said. But there’s a catch. If educators want to use the broader SimCity world for free-form exploration they’ll have to buy the commercial license – a cost of about $60. Getting both the focused and free-form experience could cost more than many educators are willing to pay.

Not all education experts agree that assessment should be built into games. “The game should be a place of play and experimentation,” said Henry Jenkins, a USC professor on the forefront of game-based learning. “Meta-gaming is where the learning could be without disrupting the ecology of the game.” The “meta-game” is the world outside the game often composed of fans who discuss what they are making in the game with one another, write fan fiction and in other ways continue to create material even when not playing.

Getty

Games are increasingly recognized by educators as a way to get kids excited about learning. While the stereotype of a “gamer” may evoke the image of a high school boy holed up in a dark room playing on a console, in reality 62 percent of gamers play with other people either in person or online, and 47 percent of all gamers are girls.

Game developers and academics who have been studying the elements that go into making games more attractive to girls found that those very same qualities are also important components of learning. For instance, girls are more drawn to games that require problem solving in context, that are collaborative (played through social media) and that produce what’s perceived to be a social good. They also like games that simulate the real word and are particularly drawn to “transmedia” content that draws on characters from books, movies, or toys.

“Something we’ve seen as a tremendous motivator for girls to learn about math and science is that they need to see the connection from the classroom out into the real world,” said Victoria Van Voorhis, the founder of Second Avenue Learning in a recent webinar. Her company has received funding from the National Science Foundation to study how to reach girls through gaming with the help of the Rochester Institute of Technology. They tested a physical science game called “Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines” with middle school girls in urban, suburban, and rural environments to gauge whether playing the game would increase their interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), whether it appealed to them and if it could improve their understanding of fundamental mechanical devices.

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“When we asked them about springs and levers, they had no understanding of why they were important in the real world,” Van Voorhis said. “But when we were able to situate those kinds of tools in a real-world context, where they were solving a problem that was directed towards social good, we saw the engagement numbers pop.”  girls were talking about physics or game play 76 percent of the time and were only off topic 5 percent of the time.

One of the biggest draws for girls to gaming are the passionate communities that spring up around the games. Affinity groups, or what’s sometimes referred to as the meta-game, often involve users creating their own story lines, interacting with each other and sharing. Jayne Lammers, a professor at the University of Rochester, spent extensive time studying affinity groups of girls that play SIMs, the game that allows users to simulate real life through the game, and watched girls go from consumers to creators in the space. They wrote stories, solicited feedback from peers, demonstrated self-awareness, and even learned elements of programming and design through their creations.

“As we think about how girls are developing these skills outside of the classroom such as affinity spaces, I think it’s important that we think about how to bring it back into the classroom,” Lammers said. But it can be hard to convince parents and administrators that a video game is helping students learn, especially when game-producers have upended some foundational thinking about how to educate – like allowing a student to interpret and analyze a subject on their own before giving them explicit content instruction.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” Van Voorhis said. She advocates for thinking of learning as a non-linear path, where steps are taken forward, but also backwards and sideways.

“The critical thinking and the problem solving that students experience in games create spontaneous innovation,” Van Voorhis said. “It can be the catalyst and the spark to get a kid to that ‘ah ha moment’ that inspire a kid to get deeper into that content area.” And games allow kids to experiment, try new methods and fail without consequences.

Van Voorhis constructed a different version of Bloom’s Taxonomy based on game play, in which students first explore a theme informally, and that process helps them understand written text afterwards.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” she said.

Second Avenue

A flipped version of Bloom's Taxonomy, informed by game-play.