From Jo Boaler and the youcubed team:
Summer might seem a long way off as we approach the holiday season, but at youcubed planning for 2023 summer camps has already begun! In the past we have hosted our own camps, both for research purposes and to capture video of recommended teaching practices and student interviews. You can read about our research on the impact of this summer experience in this paper published by NCTM: https://www.youcubed.org/downloadable/prove-it-to-me-nctm-paper/
When we first taught our camp, skeptics told us that we only got such big achievement gains because the students came to Stanford. This journal article shares the impact of youcubed camps taught by teachers across the United States, with the same amazing results for students: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.784393/full. I am currently working on a new paper describing what teachers learned from teaching the camps, and how the experience changed their teaching going forward.
Instead of hosting our own camp in 2023, we plan to support teachers all over the world who will be running youcubed-inspired camps at different grade levels! One example that we’re particularly excited about is Il Cielo Itinerante, an Italian nonprofit agency that encourages underserved children to pursue STEM subjects by piquing their curiosity through the observation of the sky. Their ambassador is Samantha Cristoforetti, an astronaut who has spoken with the program’s students directly from the International Space Station!
While they focus on space exploration-- Il Cielo Itinerante means “The Traveling Sky”—the organization has identified mathematics as a critical area to inspire students and promote their interest in STEM fields. They plan to hold 4 camps in Naples this summer for a total of 200 students, using youcubed teaching approaches. The program will include 3 hours of mathematics per day based on our summer camp curriculum. Stay tuned for updates from Italy as this exciting project gets underway!
The teacher training and curriculum for hosting your own youcubed-inspired summer camp is available through a workshop that we host annually on the Stanford campus. In 2023, this professional development session will take place on March 7 and 8 and still has space available for registration. You can find the details and online enrollment here: https://sto.stanfordtickets.org/youcubed22-23/teachingsummercamp, and if you have any questions about the summer camp program, please email us at camps@youcubed.org.
We’re also excited to host more sessions of our popular “Teaching Mathematics through Big Ideas” workshop series in 2023. Our next event, in January, focuses on the elementary years and only has a few spaces left (a waitlist will be available on the registration page when it sells out)-- https://sto.stanfordtickets.org/youcubed22-23/teachingmathematicsthroughbigideas. In the spring, we have two big ideas workshops for middle school teachers— there's still time to enroll in our one-day online workshop in April or our two-day workshop at Stanford in May: https://sto.stanfordtickets.org/youcubed22-23/teaching-mathematics-through-big-ideas-in-the-middle-years-virtual
And our 2023 schedule of workshops on teaching our high school data science curriculum was just released! In the summer, we will offer our 2-day online workshop for Units 1-4 and for the first time ever, a weeklong workshop at Stanford on the whole curriculum. The course is now in its second year of implementation with 1,800 teachers reporting they are teaching it to 160,000 students. You can learn more about the course and watch video testimonials from students who took it last year on our data science curriculum website.
We hope to see you in the new year-- whether you are preparing to host a summer camp, learning to inspire students through the big ideas in mathematics, or exploring the exciting world of data science!
https://hsdatascience.youcubed.org/