Math Walks as a Mechanism for Place-Based STEM Learning in Informal Spaces�

CANDACE WALKINGTON,�MIN WANG, & TONY PETROSINO�SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY�KOSHI DHINGRA�TALKSTEM

The walkSTEM^® Initiative

from the talkSTEM nonprofit organization:

Building a STEM Learning Ecosystem in Dallas

Our Goals:

• - Develop students who self-identify with “I can do STEM!”
• - Ensure our teachers and other educators have the confidence to teach STEM
• - Engage our community of after-school partners and parents with accessible STEM curriculum
• …we must create a culture of mobilizing learning in and out of the classroom.

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How can we connect all those involved in educating our youth (in and out of school) to build a learning and teaching system across communities that ensures the development of every student and educator’s STEM identity?

Problem / Question

• Content created by our team is freely accessible - videos on YouTube, app-guided tours, brochures
• Our Design Frameworks and Educator Guides for Create Your Own walkSTEM are freely downloadable on talkSTEM.org

Building a walkSTEM community by sharing walkSTEM content and walkSTEM methods freely

The walkSTEM platform and resources can connect all school and out of school partners to build an accessible Dallas-based STEM learning ecosystem to ensure our students are engaged and are developing their STEM mindsets.

Halle Blend, Student at The Hockaday Girls School

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talkSTEM team

How much water would it take to make an ice rink on the Ronald Kirk Bridge in West Dallas?

Dr. Candace Walkington, Professor SMU Simmons School of Education & Human Development

The walkSTEM Value Proposition

In Homes/ Neighborhoods

On Field Trips

In Schools

Input and collaboration from our ecosystem of partners across DFW creates compelling and accessible content for our students, teachers, and families.

Our Partners

• SMU
• Dallas ISD
• UT Dallas
• Uplift Education
• Hockaday

• Dallas Arboretum
• Dallas Love Field Airport
• Downtown Dallas
• Dallas Museum of Art
• Fair Park
• NorthPark Center
• Red Bird Mall
• Many others…

• Otocast (app platform)
• Belouga.org (allows 1:1 interactions between teacher and students)
• Social media – YouTube

• Dallas Afterschool
• Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas
• Science in the City
• Big Thought
• Trinity River Audubon Center
• Texas Discovery Gardens
• Dallas Black Dance Theatre

How many people have we helped?

• Teachers/informal educators – over 1,000
• Students – over 2,000 (in-person events)
• Parents – 250 (in-person events/ parent workshops)

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How have we done it?

• # of in-person community events - 40
• # of virtual events (2019 and 2020) - 20
• # of videos – approx. 350
• # of educator resources/publications - 150

Our First 5 Years

walkSTEM has Engaged Numerous Educators, Parents, and Children with Our Suite of Learning Tools.

Messages from Our Partners

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We are excited for the possibilities for our schools to have opportunities to experience walkSTEM activities throughout the school day and in the broader community. These experiences will greatly enhance and deepen the education of our students.

• Oswaldo Alvarenga, Director of STEM, Dallas Independent School District

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We partnered with walkSTEM early on because we know that it provides a valuable tool for engaging in the natural world by seeing it through a different lens than the average visitor is accustomed to. Exploring the world around you – in an informal manner but with research-based pedagogy – helps people merge what they’ve learned with what they experience.

- Dustin Miller, Senior Director of Experience and Innovation, Dallas Arboretum

Simmons SMU has collaborated with Koshi Dhingra through talkSTEM and walkSTEM for a number of years. Our faculty have trained as docents to lead families and students on walks to discover math and science in everyday life. Students in our teacher preparation programs have developed STEAM walks to use with their K-12 classes – and then involved the students in their classes in creating their own walks. During the pandemic shutdown, our faculty videoed themselves using walkSTEM math activities that parents could do with their children. The approach works because it is grounded in the context of the familiar places that surround us, it promotes collaborative inquiry among and between kids and adults, and it stimulates inquiry and curiosity that is the basis for meaningful learning. In addition, the cost to develop and engage in walkSTEM activities is relatively small for a big impact, making it particularly appropriate for teachers and families.

Stephanie Knight, Dean, SMU Simmons School of Education and Development

Messages from Our Partners

Scaling and Driving a Cultural Shift

walkSTEM is now Focused on Scaling and Driving a Cultural Shift to foster the development of all students’ STEM Identity through their Everyday Lived Experiences, Especially Underserved Populations

Visit the talkSTEM YouTube channel for hundreds of short videos showing STEM in real world places across the city of Dallas - and beyond.

Download the Otocast app, and search for walkSTEM to take an app-guided walkSTEM tour in Dallas, including on the SMU campus

More walkSTEM stops

Research on walkSTEM

• Theoretical Framework
• Research on math walks with families in the Dallas Arts District
• Research on elementary math walks club at SHSA
• Research on virtual walks with Upward Bound high school students
• Current NSF AISL grant to build “Mathfinder” app

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

• Problem-posing is the broad-based, inquiry-oriented process by which students generate new mathematical problems (Silver, 1994)
• A recent meta-analysis on problem-posing suggests effect sizes ranging from 0.5 to 0.75, importance of free PP (Wang, Walkington, & Rouse, under review)
• Interest can be triggered by experiencing math walks, and then maintained as students take increasing ownership of the experience and become immersed (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
• AR can allow for student agency and immersion (Bujak et al., 2013; Johnson-Glenburg, 2018)

Martinez-Sevilla, Ureña, and Recio (2018)

WALKSTEM IN THE DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT

• Qualtrics surveys of walk participants
• What did you learn?
• Pre-/Post- Qualtrics surveys of docents
• What was your favorite aspect of the walk?
• What was challenging?
• Funded by SMU URC grant

Walkington, Wilhelm, & Wang, 2016

WALKSTEM IN THE DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT

WALKSTEM IN THE DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT

Walkington, Wilhelm, & Wang, 2016

WALKSTEM IN THE DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT

• “Being able to explain how art and math go hand in hand in some of the amazing infrastructures and art pieces in the arts district. The students faces light up when they discover this.”
• “I loved seeing the kids engaged and looking for more things to measure/observe at each stop than just the ones we showed them.”
• “My favorite aspect of the walk was being able to interact with the kids, especially at the REALLY Big Number stop. The kids were really engaged and spent several blocks discussing other objects or shapes we could count.”
• “The walk was very interactive and children were engaged which made is difficult to keep track of time.”

Walkington, Wilhelm, & Wang, 2016

WALKSTEM CLUB AT SHSA

• 10 students in Grades 3-5 at an urban school in the metroplex
• 15 club meetings over 4 months were video-recorded
• Pre-/post- surveys and interviews
• Explored their campus and created their own video math walk with three stops:
• The swings
• The geodome
• The big number room
• Funded by AERA ERSP grant

Wang, Walkington, & Dhingra, in press

WALKSTEM CLUB AT SHSA

WALKSTEM CLUB AT SHSA

• Students became more interested in mathematics after participating in the club.
• All students can create mathematically meaningful and engaging problems with appropriate scaffolding.

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• Some scaffolding strategies to support students' problem-posing performance:
• Using free, semi-structured, and structured problem-posing tasks together(Stoyanova, 2003).
• Having a prior participant introduce the math walk experience from a student's perspective.
• Utilize technology to increase students' interest and participation level (e.g., making a video).

Wang, Walkington, & Dhingra, in press

VIRTUAL WALKSTEM FOR HS ENRICHMENT

• This study investigates high school students’ problem-posing performance in the online walkSTEM program. Students met with the instructors and other program members online and watched walkSTEM videos, took photos and posed questions accordingly, and designed virtual walkSTEM walks and presented to peers to parents collaboratively.
• This mixed method research analyzed student-generated questions’ complexity levels and students’ dispositions toward problem-posing and mathematics with quantitative and qualitative methods.
• Funded by Caruth Institute of Engineering Education Seed Grant

WALKSTEM GAME BOARD

• watch walkSTEM Videos and win Experience Points

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• create #STEMlens photos and win Experience Points

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• choose fictional creatures (avatars in the game) for oneselves

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• level up in the game

Things to do on the walkSTEM Game Board

SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES

VIRTUAL WALKSTEM FOR HS ENRICHMENT

• Pre–Survey :
• Q1: From just looking at the picture, how many circles can be calculated by each color?
• Q2: What is the length of the bathroom and kitchen different from the length of the bedroom to the terrace by millimeters.

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• Post-Survey:
• Q1: I see all of the circles on top of each other and I would ask the question of, What could the radius of all the circles, and could they all be the same?
• Q2: What could be the cm of each room of this house, and how you turn it into a m.
• Q2: What is the volume of the whole house by comparing each rooms size?

Q2 Pose a mathematical problem based on this apartment floor plan or this apartment buying scenario.

Q1 Describe the mathematical ideas you see in this picture. What questions might you pose based on this picture?

VIRTUAL WALKSTEM FOR HS ENRICHMENT

• Students posed more complicated problems for the final walkSTEM walk compared to problems posed in pre-survey (t(11)=-4.29, p=.001), videos (t(9)=-5.90, p<.001), and STEMlens (t(8)=-6.22, p<.001). This result resonated with the authentic audience effect introduced in Crespo (2003).

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• There is no statistically significant difference between the content complexity level of the problems students posed in the pre- and post-survey, t(16)=-.24, p=.81.

VIRTUAL WALKSTEM

• Program’s impacts:
• Ask more questions, think deeper
• Interest toward mathematics
• Inspire career-related thinking
• What students like about this program:
• Making connections to STEM, Art, humanities, etc.
• Posing problems.
• Main challenges in this program:
• Identify problems worth exploring
• Solve self-generated problems (took longer to solve than textbook problems)

If I have friends and I think I will recommend them to program because actually make you think it actually gives you a profession of yourself that you did not know because something as a student you just ask like, why would the teacher ask me this kind of question and when you do this kind of growth of project you actually understand what situation the teacher was in and why did she ask this question?

It helped me think more. See different ways to ask questions. There's not only one question, you can ask multiple questions in a different setting.

I can think more, ask questions. It might take longer to answer the questions. But there will be an answer for it at some point. This is one of the ways I could help my future student. See more differently, have a different perspective in STEM.

I think it's improved (interest in math) because now I can see math in my daily life like just walking around.

ADVANCING INFORMAL STEM LEARNING WITH MATH WALKS

• New $2.5 million NSF AISL grant, with collaborators Elizabeth Stringer (Guildhall), Tony Petrosino (SMU), and Cathy Ringstaff (WestEd)
• Partnering with 9 informal learning sites
• Creating a location-based mobile iPad app for math walks
• Grades 4-8 students can both experience math walk stops, and create their own walk stops, all within an immersive game “Mathfinder”
• Research on “STEM ecosystem” around informal math learning

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ADVANCING INFORMAL STEM LEARNING WITH MATH WALKS

• Location-Based, Mobile
• Walk Stops Map

• Author content, accumulate points, rewards, levels

• View AR overlays, culturally-relevant connections

ADVANCING INFORMAL STEM LEARNING WITH MATH WALKS

• Research Studies:
• Impact on attitudes towards math and ability to apply “math lens” to everyday life
• Comparison of with versus without AR overlays
• Comparison of experiencing math walks versus creating them
• Effects of peer-review of walk stops

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mathfinder Team: Cathy Ringstaff, Elizabeth Stringer, Saki Milton, Marc Sager, Brian Rust, Joo-won Kim, Martin Sawkins, Doug Service, Prathyaksh Subramanian Kaushik, Arjun Devappa

Advisory Board: Rick Duschl, Glen Whitney, Angela Calabrese-Barton, Teddy Chao, Erin Ottmar, Lynn Dierking, Flavio Azvedo

Other Research Collaborators: Annie Wilhelm, Wenyun Wang, Robyn Pinilla

• This work was funded in part by the SMU University Research Council and the Caruth Institute of Engineering Education.
• This material is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant DRL 2115393. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? IDEAS?

• Website: https://sites.google.com/view/mathfinder/home

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• Contact Information:
• Min Wang, minwang@smu.edu, @MWang_147
• Candace Walkington, cwalkington@smu.edu, @CandaceWalking1
• Koshi Dhingra, koshi@talkstem.org, @talkingSTEM
• Tony Petrosino, apetrosino@mail.smu.edu, @ajpetrosino