SCC: I4all (interests for all): A smart socio-technical infrastructure to identify, cultivate, and sustain youth STEAM interests in a diverse midsized American city

This proposal to the Smart & Connected Cities program offers a plan for designing and implementing—in close collaboration with various community stakeholders in youth serving organizations in the city of Evanston, IL—a new approach to sparking, cultivating, and supporting the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) interests of all young people in this diverse medium-sized city. We call this proposed project “Interests for All (I4All): A smart socio-technical infrastructure to identify, cultivate, and sustain youth STEAM interests in a diverse midsized American city”. The proposal builds both conceptually and materially on the prior work from both the principal investigator and co-principal investigator. In particular the project builds on Pinkard’s Cities of Learning project and Stevens’ FUSE Studios project. Both of these projects have explicit goals to broaden participation in STEAM pursuits, a goal that would be significantly advanced through I4All. In this project, we will evaluate the success of the I4All infrastructure with quantitative metrics that will tell us whether and to what degree Evanston youth are finding and developing their STEAM interests and—critical to our approach—whether the I4All infrastructure supports a significantly more equitable distribution of opportunities to youth, instead of it being a vehicle for the reproduction of inequities in OST STEAM offerings. This is a known problem in Evanston (Lewis & Diamond, 2015 and nationally, Dawson, 2014). We will also conduct in depth qualitative case studies of youth interest development. These longitudinal studies will complement our quantitative metrics of participation and give us an ‘experience near’ representation of how youth and adults are using the I4All infrastructure. As a DBIR project, the experience-level data from these case studies will also inform our design revisions to the socio-technical infrastructure. Another resource for our design rev