MCLA Professor Joins WGBH, NASA in STEM Education Effort
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NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Dr. Nick Stroud, associate professor of technology and science education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, is part of a $10 million effort titled “Bring the Universe to America’s Classroom,” that will develop new resources for teaching science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to students across the country.
Over the next five years, the education team at Boston public media producer WGBH will receive approximately $10 million from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop new STEM instructional models and digital media tools.
“Teachers may not see NASA as a resource they have access to,” Stoud said. “One of the great things this project will do is to provide an easy entry to the kind of work NASA does, and bring it to the classroom in a way that is accessible, meaningful and engaging. Its purpose is to create content to excite young students about science education.”
As a project advisor, Stroud will oversee plans for the videos, interactive projects, data visualizations, lesson plans and student activities that will be part of the endeavor.
These resources – to be delivered to teachers free of charge via the PBS LearningMedia educators’ portal – will contain multimedia content from NASA and WGBH’s public television shows that teach STEM concepts to youth, and are expected to reach millions of students and teachers across America.
As the project continues, Stroud also will provide guidance, structure and vision for what might be accomplished.
In addition to working at the state level on science standards for Massachusetts, Stroud is the principal investigator for the National Science Foundation-funded project, “Teaching to Learn,” a collaborative effort between MCLA, Williams College and North Adams Public Schools, which places pairs of undergraduate students in local classrooms to teach science to elementary school children.
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