Bowers Institute Report 16-17

Your contributions at work July 2016 through June 2017 Learning and inspiration are at the heart of everything The Tech does, from our exhibits to our education programs.

Because of you, we are able to expand the world for more students every day, to spark their imaginations and show them that they are innovators — innovators who can change the world.

Bowers Institute The Bowers Institute (formerly called the Design Challenge Learning institute) is The Tech’s hub of STEM professional learning — supporting teachers, after-school educators and librarians who want to strengthen their ability to share with their students design thinking and the engineering design process.

In the Bowers Institute, we build on educator experiences, create a community of supportive peers and offer new and innovative resources for teaching. Participants range from those just starting their STEM-teaching journey to veteran STEM educators wanting to build new skills, recharge their inspiration and lead change within their organizations.

In fiscal year 2017, we delivered over 4,000 contact hours of professional development through the Bowers Institute. Educators are always excited to take what they’ve learned back to their programs to share with students.

“In my classroom, there are immediate projects that I will apply this to: model houses, renewable energy projects, gardening projects.”

— Educator at a Bowers Institute workshop

The Tech Academies of Innovation A core Bowers Institute program is The Tech Academies of Innovation, a multi-year program to develop a STEM educator ecosystem that grows and sustains engineering education excellence in our community’s most underserved school districts. This intensive program brings together administrators, teachers and after-school educators, creating an impactful team at each school that can support and grow STEM education expertise and capacity. We are also beginning the work of convening Tech Academies partners with feeder schools and community organizations, supporting them as they map kindergarten-to-college STEM education opportunities for their students. Through The Tech Academies, we support educators across 8 districts in San Jose, Campbell, Morgan Hill and Gilroy and impact 7,000 underserved students every year.

Many Tech Academies educators don’t have backgrounds in science or engineering and begin the program with little confidence in their ability to teach STEM. The program helps them strengthen that confidence and increase the hours of STEM learning they share with their students (from 1 to 4.5 hours per week).

Because of this growth, students are demonstrating a higher interest and self-efficacy in engineering and an increase in their ability to persevere through challenging tests.

“What I learned is that it is OK to fail, and as long as you keep on trying, you will not lose.”

— Student at a Tech Academies school

Expanding the Impact of a Field Trip The Tech’s long running Science Lab program has shown us that students engage most deeply in facilitated, hands-on experiences. Our new Innovation Labs — which take place in exhibit areas, The Tech Studio and the BioTinkering Lab — engage students in the innovation design process and give them opportunities to solve real-world problems and explore new tools and materials. Our goal is to ensure that every student who comes to The Tech on a field trip gets to experience this kind of learning through a Science Lab or an Innovation Lab. About 120,000 students come to The Tech on field trips per year. More than 60% of them are from low-income Title I schools.

We are also expanding our field trip impact to include chaperones (educators and parents) by helping them recognize the learning and inspiration their students are experiencing. Using our new observation tool, they learn to identify critical skills students are developing, like problem-solving, collaboration and iteration. With this new understanding, they are better prepared to support today’s youth in STEM learning, in the classroom and at home.

“We may not have our own (fabrication) labs, science labs and other STEM resources, but we have The Tech.”

— Maria Arias Evans, former principal, Washington Elementary School, San Jose

Girls @ The Tech Our mission is to inspire the innovator in everyone, and “everyone” includes girls. Our goal is to significantly increase the participation of girls in STEM activities and women in STEM careers. To this end, we developed Girls Days @ The Tech: events that specifically celebrate girls and women in STEM and create a forum where girls, and their families, can actively engage in engineering and science, surrounded by other girls and women doing the same. In 2017, we also launched the Girls @ The Tech Luncheon, where high school girls were inspired by professional women in STEM careers. We are building on our Tech Challenge success among girls, who made up over 40% of about 3,000 participants in 2017.

We held two Girls Days @ The Tech in 2017: Dream Big in February and Everybody Makes in May, and they were attended by more than 5,600 girls and family members. It was a powerful experience to hear girls talking about following their passions, whether they dreamed of being an engineer, a teacher, an artist or a soccer player. They shared responses like, “These women inspire us to reach for the stars and pursue our dreams,” and “It inspires me to innovate and solve the world’s problems.”

“Today made me feel like I want to follow my heart.”

— Young woman who attended Girls Day

#MadeAtTheTech

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