Great question, Laura! Yes, all the parents and caring adults who participate have children in our program so we follow up with them (or their children) at the end of the program to understand the additional opportunities they have connected with outside of our program. We also ask questions about the people that they stay in contact with outside of our program but we'd love to do a long-term study in the future to understand the impact of building a community of parents and caring adults over time.

Thanks for the additional info - we provide students with access to diverse STEM video role models and include ongoing tips/info on how they can learn more about STEM careers - with our latest round of NSF funding we are adding more features into our product to support the adult advocates in these students' lives too. Best wishes for continued success with your project.

Thanks so much, Caitlin and Sheena, for your video and for posting the link to your recent chapter publication. Our YouthAstroNet project (http://stemforall2017.videohall.com/presentations/971) has parents and caregivers as a third intended audience to engage in our inclusive STEM learning community (in addition to our youth and their educators). We have not yet really been able to make much progress on this, other than caregiver participation in local capstone project events — so we have a lot to learn from your work! One of our challenges is that we are primarily working with our educators and youth remotely — via an online community and remote interactions — making it particularly difficult to reach out to parents. Given this, can you comment on your framework of roles to guide caregivers in supporting their youth’s STEM learning, and whether any of these roles might be transferable to an online learning environment?

Hi, Mary. Thanks for your comment and for sharing your amazing video (the shout out to mom at the end sets the parent work up perfectly!). Your question about online interaction and engagement is such a great one. We have been thinking a lot about this too, given that families are so busy and not everyone can always come to our workshop sessions. A few things that may be of interest to you: (1) Inspired by Brigid Barron's work articulating parent roles in technology learning found in case studies of Silicon Valley youth (http://life-slc.org/docs/barron-parentsaslearni...), we adapted the work to look at adult mentors interactions with youth online (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1743...). We share these ideas with parents in workshops, supporting and reflecting on the roles parents play in on and offline interactions. For example, using online spaces to be an audience to work, to provide encouragement and prompt further thinking through comments or image-based reactions. (2) We are turning some of our workshops (which focus on individual roles from those frameworks) into online modules, using screen-capture, video, images, and voiceover (framing information and setting up related activities), delivering these modules through the space where they are already connected to each other (the parent program Facebook group) to share and discuss. 

Great question Jackie. It's a team effort. We make phone calls, we set up a social media page and we send weekly emails to parents updating them on what their students are learning in class. We also find a teacher in the school who can champion our program and support our efforts to get parents involved. In our last iteration we encouraged parents to strengthen their relational web by giving them a chance to talk to each other about issues they are encountering around their students' involvement in STEAM programming. 

Hi, Martin. Currently, our workshops with parents and other caring adults in their lives happen concurrently with the girls being in the program. So the girls are engaged in their regular program activities with their peers and adult mentors, while the parents are working together in a separate room. This approach is purposefully building a community of parents as these parents work together on STEM/STEAM activities (such as building an LED-embedded paper card) and other types of activities to support their daughters in STEM learning (such as using tech tools and discussions to find summer city programming in STEM that matches their needs and intentions). Girls and parents do come together after the sessions to do a cross showcase, where girls show adults what they have done and vice versa. Parents are also encouraged to continue these types of activities at home WITH their children, and we have discussions around how this is going, and sometimes seed project ideas and provide resources to take home.