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Project Features:
Overviews program purposes, approaches, and potential impacts.
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Program Summary
SRI International and Girls Incorporated of Alameda County are implementing
Build IT, an afterschool and summer youth-based project for low-income
middle school girls (sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) to develop IT
fluency, interest in mathematics, and knowledge of IT careers. The Build
IT project, a cornerstone of the Girls Inc. Middle School Program, will
reach 150 girls initially and provide 150 contact hours per year. Build
IT is a problem-based curriculum that capitalizes on girls’ interest in
design and communication technologies and incorporates performance tasks for
IT fluency assessment. It provides structured interactions with IT
professionals, including having girls participate as design partners in
the software engineering process. Using the design process to achieve
technology fluency will provide new insights for research on technology
fluency and potential new contexts for research focused on learning STEM
concepts through design.
The broader impacts are increased interest in IT and IT careers among
minority girls; enhanced staff capacity; and curricular, professional
development, and assessment materials portable to Girls Inc.'s 1,500
program sites that reach more than 600,000 girls annually. The evaluation
instrumentation and research findings will be made available through
publications conferences to the informal learning community and to the
larger education technology community. |
