Spain Randall, Penilla Carlos, Ozer Elizabeth, Taylor Robert, Ringstaff Cathy, Lester James
Center for Educational Informatics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.
Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco, CA.
J STEM Outreach. 2021;4(4). doi: 10.15695/jstem/v4i4.09. Epub 2021 Oct 4.
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a dramatic nationwide shift in K-12 education from in-person classroom learning to remote online learning. This shift left teachers and parents facing the challenge of finding engaging online resources to motivate students to become deeply involved in science learning. The pandemic also left educators and researchers, whose work focuses on providing students with experiential learning opportunities in the sciences, with the challenge of adapting to virtual and remote models to continue engaging students in STEM learning activities. In this article we describe: 1) the Health Quest project, which centers on the development of technology-rich learning resources to promote middle grade students' interest in health science careers, with a focus on girls and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities; and 2) how the project has responded to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Health Quest, through engaging narrative-based learning scenarios, students work with virtual characters to experience health science careers from multiple perspectives. Although originally envisioned for in-person classroom learning, we discuss how the team is adapting the Health Quest Career Adventure Game to remote learning, including highlighting the role science plays in addressing public health outbreaks. We describe new gameplay features that have been added to support career modeling and how we have adapted the core technology underpinning Health Quest to support broad dissemination to meet the project's broader goal of increasing adolescents' interest in and self-efficacy for pursuing health science careers. We conclude with a discussion of how our evaluation strategies have changed from in-person focus groups and testing to an online data collection model and lessons learned.
新冠疫情使美国从幼儿园到12年级（K-12）的教育在全国范围内发生了巨大转变，从面对面的课堂学习转向远程在线学习。这一转变让教师和家长面临着寻找引人入胜的在线资源，以激励学生深入参与科学学习的挑战。疫情也给专注于为学生提供科学体验式学习机会的教育工作者和研究人员带来了挑战，他们需要适应虚拟和远程模式，继续让学生参与STEM学习活动。在本文中，我们描述了：1）“健康探索”项目，该项目专注于开发丰富的技术学习资源，以提高初中学生对健康科学职业的兴趣，重点关注女孩以及代表性不足的种族和少数族裔；2）该项目如何应对新冠疫情带来的挑战。在“健康探索”项目中，学生通过参与基于叙事的学习场景，与虚拟角色合作，从多个角度体验健康科学职业。尽管该项目最初是为面对面课堂学习设计的，但我们讨论了团队如何将“健康探索职业冒险游戏”改编为远程学习模式，包括强调科学在应对公共卫生突发事件中所起的作用。我们描述了为支持职业建模而添加的新游戏功能，以及我们如何调整“健康探索”的核心技术以支持广泛传播，以实现该项目提高青少年对从事健康科学职业的兴趣和自我效能感这一更广泛的目标。最后，我们讨论了我们的评估策略如何从面对面的焦点小组和测试转变为在线数据收集模式以及所吸取的经验教训。
