 Can you talk more about what your research reveals about the pedagogy surrounding the use of STEAM tools and materials? Kylie Pepper: Tools and materials aren’t going to solve all the problems. You still have to use good pedagogy. To put the learning in your favor, you have to understand the problems the students are trying to solve, such as simple circuits. You also have to understand the audience, such as girls, boys, and the equity issue that is in play. For kids that haven’t had experiences in tying their shoes, you need to start with paper circuits or squishy circuits instead of e-textiles. Paper circuits and squishy circuits can be done without tying a knot. Then, you get the students to practice, practice, practice with the tools and materials. That is what we do as educators. Good tools and materials, though, don’t replace good educators. A good educator understands the tools and materials that are important to use for their particular students. For example, in the past, the usual way of teaching circuits with a battery, wires, and lightbulb was hard for kids to understand. These tools have been used for many years and research shows that the kids just aren’t learning this. Engineering and physics students are still failing these items in college. When we rethink the tools, we see changes in the students’ learning. For example, two girls had one of my e-textile workshops. Several years later I learned that they remembered what they had learned about circuits and were still able to apply what they learned. The dividends are big once you get over the initial hurdle. In teaching engineering, if you have the right tools and materials, you can get kids to understand concepts that people have thought needed to wait until higher ed. For example, we did squishy circuits with Early Childhood youth, using concepts that kids often don’t understand until college, if at all. But the Early Childhood kids understood because we were using modalities and pedagogy that addressed their learning styles. With squishy circuits teachers and kids and be successful early on.  The work of Jie Chi, CEO of Chibitronics, is a good example of the effectiveness of tools and materials. Chibitronics focuses on creativity and expression with the technology of paper circuits. This article, Paper Circuits vs. Breadboards: Materializing Learners’ Powerful Ideas Around Circuitry and Layout Design discusses how paper circuits are more effective than breadboards in teaching circuits and layout design principles for printed circuit boards. It points out the importance of choosing appropriate tools and materials to increase understanding and learning in these experiences. In Out-of-School-Time workshops with kids, we have put out tools and materials on the tables for kids to choose from, an example of free choice learning. We brought in plastic figurines of the popular animated character Dora the Explorer. Kids were creating something Dora could fly or move in such as a helicopter or boat. We increased playful interaction by making the workspace a playscape. We got 90% of the class to participate instead of just the usual 5, and kids stayed much longer – for two to three hours. The difference is we are inviting them to play instead of forcing them to learn and we are offering them choices for how they learn. This pedagogy could be instructive for K-12 teachers to help their students engage in and learn STEM. Can e-textiles engage boys also? What strategies do you use for boys? Kylie Pepper: Boys like e-textiles. We design spaces for boys and e-textiles with tools that are more masculine. The tools include such things as rhinestone studs that look good with leather and a range of other materials that are appealing to boys. It is important to use the “material language” that speaks to your audience, whether it is boys, girls, or a variety of cultures.  What do you do to keep students from shutting down when it gets too hard? Kylie Pepper: We create successful moments early on. To keep kids from shutting down during these experiences, we help them be successful from the outset. For example, kids love to get an LED to turn on, so we give them an LED and a coin cell battery and show them how to turn on the LED. We then add a switch and a battery holder. Within 15 minutes, they are building confidence and having lots of success. Though we work with kids individually, we often get them to work collaboratively to share ideas. This creates a collaborative culture because kids are more likely to ask peers for help. This gives them a sense of safety. Below are links to articles about the important work that Dr. Peppler is conducting. Squishing Circuits: Circuitry Learning with Electronics and Playdough in Early Childhood Design Workshop. Preschoolers Making, Playing, and Learning with Squishy Circuits Paper Circuits vs. Breadboards: Materializing Learners’ Powerful Ideas Around Circuitry and Layout Design Tools and materials as non-neutral actors in STEAM education Stitching Circuits: Learning About Circuitry Through E-textile Materials 
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Co-creating and Researching STEAM Climate Change Resilience Curriculum with Students and TeachersBy Collaborative Advisory Council member, Kathryn Dawson, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance; Director, Drama for Schools, College of Fine Arts, The University of Texas at Austin  The climate is changing. Communities that have been rendered vulnerable bear the brunt of cascading impacts from acute hazards that compound chronic stressors. Planet Texas 2050 (PT2050) at The University of Texas at Austin is a group of transdisciplinary researchers who work to build Texas’ resilience in the face of the climate crisis, employing traditional and community-based methods of research from a wide variety of disciplines, including the arts. Beginning in 2022, members of the Drama for Schools program in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin began to translate methods and data from PT2050’s research efforts to K-12 education using arts integration and STEAM project-based learning units. In doing so, The Drama for Schools team recognized that the entanglement of culture, well-being, and aspiration created complexity and anxiety for many young people’s relationship to climate change and their local environment (Hickman et al., 2021). Recent research on arts-based environmental justice methods argues for youth-led practices that engage vulnerability, listening, and the body as a site for making meaning and imagining possible environmental futures (Gallagher et al. 2022). Specifically, participatory action research (PAR) is noted as an effective way to structure collaborative approaches to educational research so students can have new relationships, roles, and pathways within educational improvement efforts (Cammorata & Fine, 2008; Dawson et al., 2025). Based on these arguments, the Climate Justice with Youth STEAM curriculum model was developed by Drama for Schools. In the project, university faculty and students work with K-12 teachers and students to co-design and co-research new, STEAM project-based learning units focused on climate resiliency. Our projects also reference our local climate equity plan that puts indigenous history and issues of racial and housing in/justice at the center of the effort to create a more just and equitable climate future for ALL. Drama for Schools’ 2024-2025 current Climate Justice with Youth project is based at The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, a public STEM-focused secondary school in Austin, Texas. At the heart of the current project is the creation of a Student/Teacher Learning Community (STLC), made up of Ann Richards 7th grade and high school students and teachers. The STLC spent the fall of 2024 working closely with Drama for Schools and Planet Texas 2050 facilitators to co-design, co-facilitate, and co-research the impact of new arts-integrated climate resilience project-based learning units across the entire 7th grade curriculum. Each unit used the arts to activate young people’s relational knowledge regarding the climate so that students could understand, interrogate, compare, and share their experience and standpoint on the local climate crisis with each other. In December 2024 the STLC at Ann Richards hosted an "Action Through the Arts" festival. The student-designed event for the 6th and 7th grade students (360+) included student curated guest speakers sharing about local environmental justice issues, high school student facilitations about taking climate action at the school and in the city, 7th grade students showcasing their STEAM climate resilience projects for 6th grade students, theatre performances about students’ memories in nature, and a 7th grade-led eco-arts mini-workshop on endangered and threatened Texas species. The STLC has just begun to analyze our data from the project. Initial findings indicate the importance of hyper-local learning and that a focus on preferred futures and transdisciplinarity were central to increasing our climate change resilience. Our data aligns with research that argues that “images of the future” play a crucial role “in determining present actions and in motivating social change” (Paige and Lloyd, 2023, p. 22). In sum, we found that time spent using the arts to explore our individual relationship with the environment and our collective hopes and fears regarding local community climate change impacts was healing. Through an acknowledgement and tangle of our real fears regarding the climate crisis, we began to build our personal capacity to foster future-oriented perspectives centered in care and resilience for our home city and for each other. References Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2010). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge. Dawson, K., & Lee, B. K. (2018). Drama-based pedagogy: Activating learning across the curriculum. Intellect Books. Fine, M. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge. Gallagher, K., Cardwell, N., Denichaud, D., & Valve, L. (2022). "The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography: metho-pedagogical moves in research on climate change with youth in pandemic times." Ethnography and Education 17(3), 259-274. Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., ... & van Susteren, L. (2021). “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey”. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863-e873. Paige, K and Lloyd, D. (2023). “Eco-justice and transdisciplinary approaches to education in the era of the Anthropocene: advances towards teaching and learning in a diverse world,” edited by Lester-Irabinna Rigney, in Global Perspectives and New Challenges and Perspectives on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Superdiversity and Teaching Practices, Palgrave, 20-35. 
Regardless of the level of complexity of science inquiry activities, failure can create significant cognitive dissonance in the inquirer. At the frontiers of the discipline, the dissonance can generate enormous curiosity, and intellectual and practical energy to learn more about the phenomenon and about possible other ways of studying it. Usually, it leads to comprehensive analyses of all aspects of the inquiry to learn not only about the causes of the failure but also what aspects of research tools, practices, knowledge, and understanding have been enhanced or rendered questionable. It can also engage a wider range of participants to learn about the phenomenon, ideas, and theories that were under study. These accruing benefits are not due to failure per se, but to intelligent failure analysis, which is a constructive mechanism to channel cognitive dissonance. A great example of creative failure analysis in advanced science inquiry is Sir Peter Medawar’s groundbreaking research work in immunology in the 1950s. He sought to experimentally demonstrate that permanent tolerance of transplanted tissue can be achieved through biological methods. It is reported that in his experiments on mice he met numerous failures, such as “unexpected skin infections” and “sudden animal deaths”. Another serious failure was inconsistent findings in how long the grafts survived. None of these setbacks stopped him in his quest and he eventually demonstrated that “genetically distinct cells introduced into a body during its fetal phase could not only be permanently tolerated but also make the host accept any subsequent skin grafts from the original cell donors”. This was recognized as a monumental advance in biomedicine. It confirmed a theory-based prediction made earlier by another scientist; they shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Yet Medawar had not succeeded in his quest for a biological method for permanent tolerance of skin grafts; that discovery came years later but using non-biological methods. Qualitatively, pre-college students engaged in high quality inquiry-based science learning activities are bound to experience experiment failures. They often come to inquiries with some scientific and naïve notions about the phenomena they investigate and they, like Medawar and his colleagues, want to learn more about these phenomena. For instance, they might want to learn more about carrying out productive inquiries using suitable equipment and methods; how to organize, represent, and interpret the data they collect; how to determine the results’ validity; how to relate these results to their existing knowledge; and, finally, how to communicate these results effectively. Their inquiry may take them to levels of activity that lie just a little beyond the scope of their current understanding. It is in those situations that they are most likely to experience experiment failure of one kind or another. That should be no cause for abandoning the inquiries; rather, students should learn to view these failures as the phenomenon’s authentic answer to their inquiries, showing its ways of complying with natural laws governing its existence and behavior. The cognitive dissonance they experience, therefore, should be viewed as an invitation to find out more and a welcome opportunity to develop and sharpen affective and practical capabilities for minimizing experiment failure and for analyzing it when it occurs. Thus, failure in scientific inquiry can be used to advance students’ knowledge and understanding, just as it does for seasoned researchers.   The Collaborative’s K-12 Innovation Fellows are some of the best STEAM teachers and administrators from across the United States. They are recognized for their STEAM expertise and experience, in addition to their commitment to the highest quality STEAM learning for students, teachers, and administrators. The K-12 Innovation Fellows welcome their newest member, Amanda Daniels. Amanda Daniels has been a passionate educator for over twenty years and currently serves as the District Gifted and Talented Coordinator for Melissa ISD, located just north of Dallas, TX. She holds a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a master’s degree in early childhood development. Her career spans roles as a preschool and elementary teacher and as an assistant professor in the Elementary Education Department at Northern Arizona University. Amanda has presented at educational conferences on the importance of voice and choice in the classroom and on effectively implementing project-based learning. These experiences highlight her commitment to empowering students to think critically and to approach challenges with innovation. As a futuristic and strategic thinker, Amanda excels at designing engaging, forward-thinking learning experiences for educators to inspire their students. She is dedicated to advocating for meaningful enrichment opportunities and fostering a culture of growth and creativity. Through her leadership, Amanda continues to champion innovative approaches that enhance education and unlock potential for all learners.   The Innovation Collaborative’s Advisory Council serves as the Collaborative’s non-voting think tank. It connects individual representatives of important arts, sciences, and higher education institutions they represent with the Collaborative and its work. It also fosters connections among these member individuals and institutions. Through this, the individuals and their institutions are given an important dimension of engagement and an additional level of influence in the national arts/sciences/creativity/innovation conversation. This, in turn, helps foster the arts/sciences intersections that promote creative and innovative thinking. The Collaborative welcomes the following new members of the Advisory Council, each of whom brings important expertise, experience, and networks to the Collaborative’s work. Judy Koke, Grant Advisor of the Collaborative’s current National Science Foundation (NSF) AISL Grant jointly implemented with Texas Southern University (TSU); Senior Fellow and former Deputy Director, Institute for Learning Innovation Judy Koke is a dynamic leader in the free choice learning ecosystem, with a strong track record of creating organizational change through the integration of visitor research into evidence-based decision-making. As demonstrated by her leadership roles at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Judy challenges museums to broaden and deepen their relationships with diverse audiences. Her career combines audience and learning research with museum leadership, and she has been invited to work with numerous museum boards to build a better understanding of the changing role of museums today. See Judy Koke discussing current investigations into STEAM in Out-of-School-Time through the current Collaborative-TSU NSF grant here. Anne Ludes, Collaborative K-12 Innovation Fellows Co-Chair; Director, Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Anne Ludes has earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and secondary education and a master’s degree in mathematics. She has been a high school math teacher, math department head, associate principal, director of secondary education, and assistant superintendent for secondary education. She is a strong proponent of project- and problem-based learning, with a particular emphasis on promoting transdisciplinary educational experiences across the arts, sciences, and humanities. She advocates for increased exposure to authentic learning experiences and removing barriers to access for all students, particularly those from underrepresented populations. See Anne Ludes’ exemplar STEAM lesson here. Ashley Lupfer, Collaborative K-12 Innovation Fellows Leadership Team; Art Educator, Pierre Van Courtlandt Middle School, Croton-On-Hudson, NY Ashley Lupfer teaches Visual Art and Innovation & Design for grades 5-8 at Pierre Van Courtlandt Middle School in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. Having earned a BA in art education and an MA in school administration, she is currently working toward National Board Certification. She has been a visual arts educator since 2014, with K-12 teaching experience in North Carolina, Boston, and now New York, where she is teaching within both the Art and Innovation & Design Programs. See Ashley Lupfer’s exemplar STEAM lesson here. Kimberly Olson, Collaborative K-12 Innovation Fellows Co-Chair; Pre-K through 2nd grade Art Educator, Centre School, Hampton, NH Kimberly Olson has taught visual art at Centre School in Hampton, NH, for 17 years. With her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts in Teaching degrees, she is very involved with the National Art Education Association (NAEA), representing the Elementary Division in both NAEA’s Cultural Competency in Teaching and Learning Pilot Program, and its Professional Materials Committee. She is a Connected Arts Network Teacher Leader and a Crayola Creativity Ambassador. Kimberly is passionate about sharing the inherent connections between art, science, and social studies, and works to elevate art and all its connections for all learners. See Kimberly Olson’s exemplar STEAM lesson here. Kylie Peppler, PhD, Cohort Leader, Collaborative’s current National Science Foundation AISL Grant jointly implemented with Texas Southern University; Professor of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; Director, The Creativity Labs; Co-Director, The Connected Learning Lab, University of California, Irvine Kylie Peppler works on various areas of STEAM, studying how e-textiles and other computational construction kits popularized through the Maker movement can deepen learning and broaden participation across a range of STEM fields. She is widely recognized as a leader in the STEAM field and is author of several important STEAM resources. See “The Importance of STEAM Tools and Materials: STEAM Summit Follow-up – Part 2” featuring Kylie’s work in this newsletter. Here is where you can find Part 1 of this series about Kylie’s work. You can find Kylie discussing her work here.   Thank you for being a supporter of the Innovation Collaborative! Along with access to our newsletter and its archive, the IC website currently offers much of its content without restrictions. However, beginning in May of 2025, to sign into any of the IC’s web-based content—including the newsletter—you will be required to register and create a free account. It only takes a minute or two to do so. Once you have registered, you can view all of the Collaborative’s resources, including lessons, lesson templates and rubrics, peer-reviewed articles, recommendations by practitioners and leaders in STEAM fields and research, and more. Follow these steps to create your account:
This free video game, known as AEIN-561, leads kids through the video game design process, introducing it as a STEAM career field. The game was created by the University of Southern California's Ning Wang to teach high school students how video games are made and demonstrate how artificial intelligence and search engines work. READ MORE.
A collaboration between a high school teacher and the University of Wisconsin-Stout's STEAM director led to a college and career exploration day.
The University of Wisconsin-Stout hosted 225 Menomonie High School students for a recent STEAM Day, at which they explored careers and opportunities. READ MORE. 
A K-6 school in North Carolina is embracing STEAM learning with a new SmartLab. The Triangle Math and Science Academy Elementary Campus recently opened a new SmartLab that blends creative and technical disciplines. READ MORE.
 The Innovation Collaborative’s first virtual STEAM Summit, Building Learning Through the Intersection of Science and the Arts, successfully aired on Oct. 17, 2024. The Summit featured keynote speakers, conversations among STEAM professionals, and breakout sessions facilitated by leading STEAM researchers and practitioners. These popular breakout sessions addressed ways that K-12 and Out-of-School-Time research and practice can help all students succeed. More than 150 participants registered for the Summit. The wide variety of attendees represented K-12 schools; college campuses; Out-of-School-Time organizations; arts and science organizations; and school leadership programs. Leading off, keynote speaker J.D. Talasek, Director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of the Sciences, presented an inspiring lecture titled “Pipeline of Creativity”. He spoke about the importance of integrative learning, the elasticity of the mind, and the nexus between arts and sciences. Dr. Kylie Peppler, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, presented “Tools of Change: Designing STEM Education for Inclusive Learning”. She discussed how some traditional STEM tools and materials are less effective than newer ones in engaging large populations of youth. These newer tools and materials, such as paper circuits and e-textiles, inspire more creativity and have been shown to be more inclusive and to promote successful outcomes. For further information, see the newsletter article Kylie Peppler Summit Follow-up Part 1.  Conversationalists were Dr. Bob Root-Bernstein, Emeritus Professor of Physiology at Michigan State University; Kimberly Olson, visual arts teacher at Centre School in Hampton, New Hampshire; and Dr. Sharon Delesbore, Assistant Principal, Stephen F. Austin High School in Sugar Land, Texas. Their conversations addressed the relationship between scientific discovery and the artistic process, connections between disciplines and the role of problem solving, and the crucial role of school leaders in supporting a culture of inquiry, equity, and creativity.
Six breakout sessions covered a range of relevant STEAM topics. The sessions and session facilitators were:
Click on the session title to visit each group’s created Whiteboard. Summary reports on the breakout sessions are available here. The Innovation Collaborative thanks all presenters and facilitators, in addition to Visibility Chair Jim Palmarini for his role in producing the Summit, and Visibility Team members Michael Jay and Lisa Tang for providing technical support. Visit the Collaborative’s new YouTube channel to see content from the Summit and follow us on social media for updates on upcoming programs. You can reach us at https://www.innovationcollaborative.org/contact.html  While the Innovation Collaborative’s website offers access to much of its content, to view our STEAM education resources users must create a password. Among other things, these items include lessons, lesson templates and rubrics, peer-reviewed articles, and recommendations by practitioners and leaders in STEAM fields and research. Listed under the Resource menu, registered users can access these materials by creating a free account on the Innovation Collaborative website.
Follow these steps to create a free account:
 Idea #1: Tools and materials are invitations to play. Tools and materials act as invitations, shaping who feels welcome to engage in STEAM activities. When we consider inclusivity, we ask whether the materials resonate with a broad audience, including girls, boys, and students from diverse cultural backgrounds. A simple test is to lay the materials on a table as an open invitation and observe who engages with them first. Historically, tools like the first personal computers or Legos were designed within a sensibility that appealed primarily to boys. For instance, the keyboard and mouse were conceptualized as metaphors for driving a car—a playful experience that boys often gravitated toward. This history influences how technological tools and materials are perceived and engaged with today.  In contrast, incorporating culturally relevant elements, such as Barbies or characters like Dora the Explorer, can transform these tools into inclusive experiences. By integrating aspects of youth culture familiar to girls, we create a sense of belonging and encourage their participation. Adults experience similar dynamics. For example, a grocery store’s branding and architecture signal whether the space feels welcoming or exclusive, shaping our willingness to enter and engage. These signals—both for adults and children—are a critical consideration when designing tools and environments for inclusivity in STEAM. Idea #2: Certain tools and materials are better for learning. As a learning scientist, I’m interested in the ways in which some tools and materials might be inherently better for learning, especially when they accommodate diverse ways of thinking and creativity. To investigate that, we started looking at gender. Time and time again, in a decade of research, we found that girls are looking for something creative and expressive, such as picking the design color. We are often dismissive of girls’ play, but we looked at the importance of these more “girly” components. We looked at the tools as to whether they would be expressive and offer multiple options for designing using creativity. An example is not creating one bracelet, but lots of different kinds of bracelets. By contrast, traditional “boys’ tools” often emphasize a single, correct solution, such as completing a basic circuit with a battery, wires, and a lightbulb. While such tasks are straightforward and convenient for teachers, they tend to be less engaging for girls, who often seek opportunities to build upon these basics. For example, in coding with Scratch, boys might focus on completing tasks, whereas girls often explore designing avatars and imagining narratives.  Creative tools foster more divergent learning outcomes. Take e-textiles as an example: rather than simply completing a circuit, children use sewing to trace electrical pathways, considering factors like loop continuity and strong connections for functionality. When the light flickers due to a loose connection, they learn about the importance of connectivity—an essential circuitry concept—through hands-on problem-solving. In essence, tools that encourage creativity not only engage children longer but also lead to deeper learning and more innovative outcomes.
When creating e-textiles, children mockup their circuits before sewing them down, experimenting with different configurations and exploring multiple solutions. This process transforms the simple circuit into a creative, hands-on activity that reinforces fundamental scientific principles. Thus, e-textiles not only make circuits more engaging and understandable but also boost children’s confidence in their ability to grasp and apply these concepts. By blending creativity with technical knowledge, these tools create a more inclusive and effective learning environment, particularly for those who might feel excluded from traditional STEM activities.
So, by reimagining tools and materials as inclusive, creative, and educational, we can design STEAM experiences that resonate with diverse learners, fostering both engagement and understanding. Here are some research articles that discuss tools and materials, including e-textile circuitry. Paper Circuits vs. Breadboards: Materializing Learners’ Powerful Ideas Around Circuitry and Layout Design Tools and materials as non-neutral actors in STEAM education Stitching Circuits: Learning About Circuitry Through E-textile Materials |
