Keynote & Featured Speakers
Date TBA
Computer (Science) for All: The Practice and Promise of Teaching With and About Technology
Leiselot Declercq, d-teach online training, d-teach online school, ICONS
Abstract Coming Soon
Bio: Lieselot Declercq is co-founder & director of d-teach online training, d-teach online school, ICONS (international community of online schools) & the international ‘AI awards for education’. Lieselot has over 18 years of experience in various sectors of education. She holds a teacher’s degree, a MSc in pedagogical sciences at Ghent University, a MSc in educational sciences at the Open University, certificates ‘digital transformation’ at Vlerick, ‘international relations & diplomacy’ at UA and ‘Artificial Intelligence: Implications for business strategy’ at MIT. She is industrial promotor for PhD-research and is PhD-student on ‘AI: Virtual and human teachers for professional development” in collaboration with Ghent University and Microsoft. Lieselot is member of the board of Directors of Agoria Flanders, Patron of Europe101, Fellow of Belgium’s 40 under 40 and Female Edtech Fellow Europe.
Date TBA
Creating Lifelong Learners in an Innovative World
Leigh Ann DeLyser, Executive Director, CSForAll, United States
Abstract: Teachers are challenged every day with preparing the next generation of citizens, workers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and leaders. While we always anticipated a changing world, in today’s age of leaping technological advancements, how do we think about the fundamental skills needed for the educators of the educators of the next generation (which includes some educators). In this interactive session, Dr. DeLyser will discuss some of the lessons learned from CSforALL, co-construct some of the future-ready skills needed to create lifelong learning educators, and consider what kinds of research we should be doing to best understand what success means in this endeavor.
Bio: Dr. Leigh Ann DeLyser has spent her career building the K-12 computer science (CS) field. As the Executive Director of CSforALL (csforall.org), she oversees programs and strategic planning and supervises research to build support for high quality CS education at all levels. A former high school and university CS educator, Leigh Ann understands challenges faced by teachers, administrators, and students developing their competency in the field and accessing high-quality learning opportunities and resources. Her influential “Running on Empty” report guides policies and research that support high-quality program implementation. Previously, Leigh Ann was Director of Research and Education at CSNYC, which built a foundation for CS in New York City public schools. She received a PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology, with a focus on CS education, from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. DeLyser also serves on the ACM Education Advisory Committee. Her personal research focuses on systems change, building off her PhD studies in how feedback impacts behavior of learners, and thinking critically how we create feedback structures within our multi-tiered educational systems to incentivize and reinforce high quality and equitable CS education. Dr. DeLyser has written extensively about the CSforALL community, commitments, and strategic planning with local education leaders through the SCRIPT program. She enjoys questioning our explicit commitment to equity, the need to disaggregate data and consider intersectionality, and using mixed methods with rigorous statistical approaches to understand impact of our collective community efforts.
Date TBA
Reciprocal Innovation in the Kenyan and American Educational Systems
Martin Oloo and LaNika Barnes
Under colonial rule, the British authorities established an educational system in Kenya that was a theory-based curriculum primarily taught through classroom lectures. However, 80 % of employment in Kenya consists of entrepreneurs and artisans known as Jua Kali. The phrase “Jua Kali” is Swahili for “fierce sun” (meaning that you earn your living by the sweat of your brow under a hot sun). This still leaves a large percentage of the youth unemployed. Because of this misalignment between the educational system and workforce needs, in 2017 the Kenyan government changed the curriculum to a “Competency-Based Curriculum” (CBC). However, Kenyan teachers are struggling because the changes in the new curriculum have not been reflected in the teacher education programs that prepare teachers.
The staff of FabLab Winam are working to fill this gap by creating a setting that provides a safe space where teachers can come and learn. They are establishing practical hands-on laboratories that serve as a model to enable teachers to implement the new CBC curriculum. They are collaborating with a school system in Virginia that is experienced with the implementation of the model that they plan to implement in Kenya. The two sites – Fablab Winam in Kenya and the Albemarle County Public School system (APCS) in Virginia – are jointly collaborating on development of open-source tools such a 3D-printed microscope and a microcentrifuge for use in these laboratories.
As part of this program, the Kenyan FabLab is collaborating with LaNika Barnes in Virginia. She is a faculty advisor to students in the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Jr. chapter at Albemarle High School. The NSBE Jr students participated in a Summer Engineering Academy in which they designed and fabricated a 3D-printed microscope.
FabLab Winam is in the process of replicating the microscope design developed in Virginia. Kenya is on the equator, so its biome is very different from the biome in Virginia. A Backyard Microscopy project under development will enable students in each site to compare plant and insect specimens that they find in their local neighborhoods. FabLab Winam is developing a 3D-printed microcentrifuge that the NSBE Jr students will attempt to replicate for use in Ms. Barnes biology class.
In this type of reciprocal innovation framework, each partner mutually benefits from the expertise that is shared across the collaborating sites. The ability to transmit “bits” rather than shipping “atoms”, to use the terminology employed by the M.I.T. Fab Foundation, makes this type of reciprocal innovation possible.
Bios: Martin Oloo is the founder of a Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) Winam in Kenya. FabLab Winam is in Kisumu on the edge of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. He is a social worker by training. In 2018 he participated in training provided by the Fab Foundation at M.I.T. Sherry Lassiter, director of the Fab Foundation, also provided fabrication equipment used to establish the Kenyan FabLab. His role in FabLab Winam is to understand local social problems and explain these needs to engineers in the FabLab. He then translates proposed solutions from engineering language into language that the end users can understand.
As part of work in the promotion of STEM/STEAM in schools, Martin formed Global Kids Day (GKD) in collaboration with other FabLabs. GKD focuses on technology, education and culture. This initiative brings children from FabLabs in different countries together to work on a common project virtually.
LaNika Barnes is a science teacher at Albemarle High School in Virginia. She also serves as an advisor to the National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE) Jr. chapter at Albemarle High School. She served as the lead teacher for an initiative in which NSBE Jr students successfully designed and fabricated a 3D-printed microscope using an open-source microscope in the Educational CAD Model Library (www.CADLibrary.org) as the inspiration for their design.
