Wei-Chen Hung is among the recipients of a $2 million grant-funded project toward “Examining the Application of the IFLIP Pedagogy in STEM and Pre-service Science and Math Teacher Education by Institutional Context.” The dollars from the National Science Foundation’s Institutional and Community
Read moreDrive My Car: ETRA delivers fun times to STEM Fest crowds, graduate students
Hundreds of children of all ages visited the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment’s STEM Fest booth Sept. 28 in the Anderson Hall gym. And the learning – along with the smiles – was not limited to the guests. “This is
Read moreETRA researchers employ robots again to nurture computational thinking skills within an NIU STEAM summer school
What began in Naperville Community Unit School District 203 could not stop there. Faculty from the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment interacted with around 200 students in 2021 and 2022 to observe how working with LEGO educational robots might stimulate
Read morePhotos: ETRA at STEM Fest
Several representatives from the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment staffed Booth 33 at NIU’s STEM Fest 2022, held Oct. 15. “Our VR and AR educational games were a great hit!” Chair Wei-Chen Hung said. “Kids and parents stood in long
Read moreHard fun: Naperville children provide data on robots, computational thinking
Some faculty in the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment (ETRA) were busy this summer writing about robots – and children. Can children program robots to sort differently sized objects for recycling? Can they write code for robots to simulate an
Read moreSTEM Read Institute sparks educators
Macy Gray’s journey as a teacher began at Mayatan Bilingual School, a non-profit in Honduras where she taught sixth-graders. When she returned to Illinois this summer to begin a new job this fall teaching sixth- and seventh-graders at Chicago’s Altus Academy, the
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