Workshop Detail
STEaM-Bot: An educational chatbot to promote interest in STEM fields
It has been observed that interacting with STEM professionals that have student's similar cultural/social background increases their interest in STEM. Early exposure to those role models could contribute to increase engagement in STEM fields among high-school students. In this workshop, we will introduce an educational chatbot to promote interactive engagement between STEM professionals and diverse audiences, generate discussion and propose approaches to assess if those interactions increase audience interest in STEM.
Increasing enrollment of underrepresented students could help attaining equal representation in STEM fields. However, underrepresented high school students are, on average, 6 times less likely to consider STEM professions compared to overrepresented students. It has been observed that interacting with STEM professionals that have student's similar cultural/social background increases their interest in STEM. Early exposure to those role models could contribute to increase enrollment. Furthermore, virtual technologies can be used to expand student exposure given that local access to unrepresented STEM professionals is limited.
The objectives of the workshop are to: (a) introduce an educational chatbot to promote interactive engagement between virtual STEM professionals and diverse audiences; (b) propose approaches to assess if interaction with the chatbot increases the student's interest in pursuing STEM education; and (c) generate discussion on the use of a chatbot as an accessible outreach platform that can reach locations lacking in local diverse representation in STEM.
Educational chatbots offer unique opportunities to disseminate information in a personalized and interactive manner while obtaining feedback on new types of questions that remain unanswered. The type of chatbot that will be employed in this workshop, mimics human conversations by means of markup language. We will develop the chatbot in a software with a graphical user interface and append digital representations of diverse STEM educators.
The innovative techniques featured in this workshop is the use of technology for STEM outreach and engagement of students beyond the classroom. The target audience is educators in STEM.
Itza Mendoza
Assistant Professor, Texas A&M School of Public Health
Itza Mendoza, Ph.D., is a TWRI faculty fellow. Her research interests include experimental and mathematical models to understand the transport and persistence of contaminants in the environment and associated health effects. She is currently working on antibiotic resistance in the environment and how humans contribute to and are affected by reservoirs of contaminant antibiotics and antibiotic-resistance genes in the soil.
Mendoza studied civil engineering at Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico. She conducted master's and doctoral studies in environmental engineering at Texas A&M University, conducted postdoctoral training at Michigan State University and held a research assistant position at Tufts University. She is now an assistant professor at Texas A&M School of Public Health.