Introduction to URSA
Hello to everyone who stumbles across this blog. My name is Josiah Liebert. I am a second-year Computer Science student at Oregon State University, participating in the URSA Engage program. I am from Portland, Oregon. I am interested in sustainability, learning, leadership, science, and sports. URSA stands for Undergraduate Research, Scholarships & the Arts. The goal of the URSA Engage program is to match first-year, second-year, and first-year transfer students with an OSU faculty for research in their field of interest. The program runs for 15 weeks and culminates in a Spring Showcase, where students show off the research that they have been working on. The time commitment is five hours weekly.
My mentor is Victor Villegas. Through his job at OSU Extension Services, and through investing his own free time, he creates different curricula that encourage youth in underserved and underrepresented communities to pursue STEM and STEAM careers. I applied to the URSA Engage program because I felt that my values and skillset aligned well with the work that Victor is actively pursuing. I come from a background in youth advocacy through different experiences at organizations such as Chess for Success, Bike First, and TOPSoccer. These experiences made me realize that I enjoy the creative freedom that teachers can have in making lessons in addition to the joy that children bring to learning. Finding ways to make topics interesting and fun while also explaining ideas in a way that young students can understand is something that has been appealing to me for years. I saw that Victor had experience in the field of youth advocacy, and was looking to take on an undergrad for STEAM-based lesson building. At that point, I became interested in applying.
Throughout this experience, I want to create something that will impact Oregon communities beneficially. It would be awesome to see a lesson that I create, actually be implemented successfully in some school or camp. STEAM has so many cool aspects that are not explored engagingly. They relate these subjects to negative connotations. Math is challenging or science is boring. Instead of going from a foundation of learning the ideas, and then doing some hands-on activity if we have the time, I want to create lessons that will integrate hands-on activities into learning foundational ideas. I would also love to learn from people already in these fields to learn whatever I can about teaching underserved communities STEAM, or any other topic that applies to my project.
Generally, in this experience, I will be creating STEAM-based lessons for elementary and middle school students in underserved populations. The idea of these lessons is that they are self-contained so that any teacher with the correct tools could teach the lesson to their class and that the lessons are fun, through hands-on learning. The first lesson that I will be working on will be utilizing a DataBot sensor. Be sure to keep an eye out for updates involving the specifics of the DataBot project, as well as any future projects!
If you have any questions or want to contact me, my school email is liebertj@oregonstate.edu, and this is my LinkedIn. I look forward to sharing my progress with you!
Weekly Progress Update
My progress for this week was a bit all over the place. One thing that I spent a sizeable amount of time on is updating my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a great resource for contacting people doing similar work that I am doing. My experience was very undescriptive and my about section was outdated. I spent some time explaining what I did in each of my work experiences and updating my about section to hopefully connect with more people who are interested in STEAM education. I also added a link to this blog.
Another thing that I did this week is research DataBot and Drone Blocks, to see what other educators have previously done with these pieces of equipment. There were many interesting projects, and they can range greatly in terms of how challenging they are to learn. Some interesting projects that I found were tracking a garden’s health, measuring height using a drone, measuring air quality, etc. The DataBot has a lot of different sensors which can all be used to track different important qualities of the Earth. The following picture found on their website will show all of the different sensors.
Overall, this looks to be a powerful science tool, that has a lot of different features for the price. I have not been able to actually use one yet, so I do not know what its strengths and limitations are in practice. There are a couple of thing that will need to be discussed between me and Victor surrounding audience and purpose. The specific questions are the following:
Who specifically is our audience? What grade, or age, are they? How much STEM experience do they have? Is there a specific demographic of student that I should be tailoring the lesson for?
What is the purpose of the lesson? Are there specific learning outcomes that the students should take away? Will this lesson have more of the goal to just give students a positive experience with STEM, or will there be a bigger outcome?
Two questions that I may focus on after our meeting is, What will the specific lesson look like? How will students’ demographics be reflected in this lesson?
