Project Grant 2318191

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the STEM Education (CFDA 47.076) program is funding a $299,813 project titled "Engaging Individual Education Plan Teams as Co-Designers of Middle Grades Computing Activities for Autistic Students." The project aims to develop tools and resources to create computational thinking activities for autistic students that are co-designed with their Individualized Education Plan (IEP) teams. The co-design process will bring together educators, administrators, speech-language pathologists, paraprofessionals, and counselors to support autistic students' learning about robotics and computational thinking. The project is a partnership between Tufts University's Center for Engineering Education and Outreach and the Winter Hill Community Innovation School, and will use a design-based research methodology to iteratively develop the learning activities. The findings will contribute knowledge about including critical skills such as social-emotional learning, career skills, and executive functioning with computational thinking and robotics for autistic students.