C-STEM center works to close achievement gap in mathematics education

The UC Davis Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education (C-STEM) organized the 2020 Symposium on Integrated Computing and STEM Education on Feb. 24 in collaboration with the Redlands Unified School District and the University of Redlands. One hundred and thirty students, teachers, administrators and professors shared their experiences and participated in hands-on training to learn ways to integrate coding and robotics into mathematics education. This one-day event was held at the University of Redlands.

Both entertaining and effective in capturing the interests of students, robots are useful tools for closing the achievement gap in mathematics education. C-STEM develops new and interactive curricula to teach algebra, mathematics and programming. These technologies are particularly effective in reaching students who lack interest in or struggle with mathematics and are already being used in elementary, middle and high schools throughout the country.

“[C-STEM] is a coding and robotics program focused on helping students better understand their core concepts in math, science, engineering, computer science and robotics,” said Daniel Ryan, the education service manager for C-STEM.

All software and curricula created by C-STEM are available on their website for educators to use. Additionally, the center organizes symposiums, professional development classes for educators and summer camps for students in various locations.
A full program of the events offered at the latest symposium is available on C-STEM’s website. Highlights from the event included speeches from Tim Taylor, the keynote speaker and an executive director for the Small School District Association, the C-STEM superintendents plenary panel session and the C-STEM teachers plenary panel session. There were also 16 breakout sessions and a “makerspace” for attendants to explore the robots. 

“We put on a number of different breakout sessions to introduce various K-12 teachers and educators to the C-STEM program and different strategies and options for integrating more computer programming and robotics into their classrooms,” Ryan said. 

Strategies suggested to educators included using computer programs to solve systems of linear equations and having students create their own dynamic robot systems.

One main goal of the symposium was to show educators how easy it is to integrate computer science into core K-12 classes. Many teachers originally are hesitant and cautious about the technologies, as many are not really familiar with computer science, Ryan said. 

“There’s this misconception [computer science] is a bunch of geniuses that sit and program all day, and you have to know your stuff in order to do it,” Ryan said. “We were trying to raise awareness that really anybody can get into coding. It’s a really simple easy thing to do, it’s just a matter of being able to transcribe instructions into very, very step-by-step algorithmic

logic.”

Every fall for the last nine years, C-STEM has hosted a similar symposium in Davis. After two years of integrating C-STEM’s educational tools into their curriculum, Redlands Unified School District wanted to host a symposium in Southern California for more educators to attend.  Redlands Unified School District served as a model of how the programs could be implemented, said Harry Cheng, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the director of the C-STEM program. 

“The timing was perfect to expand [C-STEM programs] to all our schools, and now that we have it at all our schools, we wanted to have a Southern California symposium so that all our teachers, administrators and other school districts could attend to see our model of implementation,” said Deepika Srivastava, the STEAM and innovation coordinator for Redlands Unified School District and one of the organizers of the symposium.

Beginning computer science education, through programs like C-STEM, as early as elementary school is important to ensure all students have equitable opportunities later on in their academic and professional careers. STEM education is the biggest equalizer in terms of knowledge and preparedness for college and future careers, Srivastava said. 

“It just opens a whole new world of opportunities for our students,” Srivastava said. “We just want to make sure that all our students have the opportunity to be successful in math and that we are not leaving any student behind.”

Redlands Unified School District is committed to providing these equitable learning opportunities for math and computer science education to all students, Srivastava said.

“The symposium validated our own fundamental belief that every kid can be successful in math, no matter where they come from and how they currently feel about their math preparedness,” Srivastava said. “C-STEM has brought joy back in the math classroom and has rejuvenated our students and teachers.”

Additionally, hands-on learning with robots and computer programing can help bridge the math achievement gap by bringing concepts to life. These technologies provide tangible mathematical models that help students understand and bring meaning to abstract concepts, Ryan said.  

“In a lot of math classes, students are constantly asking, ‘Why are we doing this? When are we ever going to use this? Why do I need to be able to solve for X in this abstract equation?’” Ryan said. “But with hands-on learning, you’re able to say ‘Alright, this is representative of something in front of you.’”

These technologies and new approaches to education have proven to help students succeed and help close the math achievement gap. For example, a school within the Orange County Unified School District saw a 37% increase in their mathematics scores in the “Smart Balance Test” after implementing these technologies for only four years, Cheng said. 

Additionally, 100% of students scoring very low on standardized mathematics tests who are English learners or have parents that recently moved to the U.S. pass their classes after working with these new technologies, according to Cheng.

“That’s how we’re using the math to close that gap,” Cheng said. “We have evidence that hands-on learning actually works great.”

Written by: Margo Rosenbaum — science@theaggie.org 

Researchers looked at interaction of gut microbiome, HIV vaccine in rhesus macaques

UC Davis researchers are investigating the gut and vaginal microbes of the primate species rhesus macaques for clues to developing a more effective vaccine for human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

In a study published last December in the open-access journal mSphere, a team of scientists directed by Dr. Smita Iyer — an assistant professor of pathology, microbiology, and immunology — explored how an experimental vaccine resembling the HVTN 111 vaccine impacted the microbiome environments of rhesus macaques and vice versa. HVTN 111 is currently wrapped up in human clinical trials, so this DNA vaccine was of particular interest to the researchers.

“As an immunologist I am driven to understanding how host factors modulate vaccine immunogenicity so we can use this information to develop vaccines against challenging infectious diseases,” Iyer wrote via email.

The findings of Iyer’s team, which included scientists from Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh, are the first to directly suggest that the immune actions of an HIV vaccine are influenced by bacteria inside our bodies.

“One of the bigger questions that has eluded the field or that people haven’t addressed substantially yet is how immunizations can affect the microbiome,” said Sonny Elizaldi, a second-year graduate student studying immunology at UC Davis and the lead author on this research study. “We wanted to ask how the vaccine affects both the fecal and vaginal microbiomes.”

The team’s research cites the rectum and vagina as the two main sites where HIV is generally transmitted between humans. Before the experimental HIV vaccine was administered, DNA samples from these two compartments were first sequenced to establish an understanding of initial microbiome compositions in each macaque’s rectum and vagina. 

Data from the study showing differences in the microbiome composition of the rectum and the vagina established that the compartments were independent of one another. This is important because it allowed the research team to investigate the rectum and the vagina as separate compartments, Elizaldi said.

A series of three vaccines — the first two containing viral HIV DNA and the third containing viral HIV protein — was administered eight weeks apart to both sites in the rhesus macaques. The immune responses at each site were characterized at zero, one and four weeks after the third immunization by data quantifying CD4 T cells, immunoglobulin A and G (IgA and IgG) antibodies and glycoprotein gp120 and gp140 antibodies. High concentrations of each indicate greater immune responses.

Although the levels of Lactobacillus and Clostridium — two prevalent gut bacteria  — in the rectum were unaffected by the HIV vaccine, the relative levels of bacteria between macaques were found to positively correlate with the recorded immune response in that animal. Conversely, levels of Prevotella, another type of gut bacteria, decreased with greater immune responses. Overall, several types of bacteria in the rectum saw significant changes after immunization.

“[Lactobacillus and Clostridium] bacteria could possibly be targeted to induce stronger antibody responses, so maybe supplementation with certain types of bacteria before you get immunized could, in fact, maybe help produce stronger antibody responses,” Elizaldi said.

When similar data was obtained from macaques that had only received a measles booster prior to experimentation, these differences were not observed, indicating that the response to the HIV vaccine seen in the rectal microbiome of the experimental group was likely due to vaccination, according to Elizaldi.

The composition of the vaginal microbiome was relatively unaltered by vaccination, suggesting that “the vaginal microbiome is maybe just a lot more resilient to change in the context of an immunization platform,” Elizaldi said. 

It is also possible that microbes in the vagina respond quickly to an initial or second immunization, but not to a third immunization, according to Elizaldi. This could explain why, when microbial composition was examined 16 weeks after the first of three vaccines was initially administered, the vaginal microbiome seemed unchanged.

The microbiome composition was tracked up until four weeks after the third immunization, so a third possibility is that vaginal microbes are slower to respond to vaccination than rectal microbes.

One limitation to developing effective HIV vaccines is that the immune response to the vaccine is often short-lived.

“One of the problems within the HIV vaccine field is developing long-lived antibodies,” Elizaldi said. “That’s something that is really eluding the field, and, I mean, that’s really the golden ticket there. If you could induce long-lived antibodies with an HIV vaccine, you’d be a little bit closer to establishing a successful vaccine, so that’s what everybody in the field is really gunning for now.”

Although this study evaluated the vaccine’s microbiome interactions specifically in macaques, the conclusions of this study could eventually be generalized to human models.

“Rhesus macaques for a long time have been a really solid model for HIV,” Elizaldi said. “That’s primarily [because] the infection kinetics, the kinetics of viral entry into the host and replication within the rhesus macaques, mimic very closely the human infection.”

How bacteria enhance or hinder the immune system’s response to a vaccine is not fully understood. But scientists’ knowledge of microbe-vaccine interactions can be refined with future investigations targeting specific genera of bacteria. Such studies could herald the arrival of an improved HIV vaccine for humans, reshaping how we treat autoimmune immunodeficiency syndrome, a disease caused by HIV, and providing hope for the millions of people who have it.

“This [research] opens the door into understanding how we can possibly target immunizations to be more synergistic with the microbiome,” Elizaldi said. 

Iyer, Elizaldi and their colleagues drew on the help of multiple departments and microbiome experts to complete this study. A team of bioinformaticians from the Bioinformatics Core Facility at the UC Davis Genome Center contributed to data analysis. 

“The most challenging aspect of the study was synthesizing complex and large data sets to understand biology,” Iyer said. 

The team also included Dr. Reben Raeman, an assistant professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, who “provided consultation to the Iyer lab on experimental design and data interpretation,” according to Raeman.

The macaques in this study were part of an adult female cohort at the California National Primate Research Center, a research unit of UC Davis. All animals tested negative for simian immunodeficiency virus, a common analog of HIV in primates.

Written by: Daniel Erenstein — science@theaggie.org