The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science Curriculum: The Digital Platform and Student Symposium Presentations

Funding text 1: The BOP-CCERS Digital Platform, https://bopuiprod.azurewebsites.net/home, serves as a repository of data, research, materials, and resources generated by the support provided by the National Science Foundation in NSF EHR DRL Grants 1839656 and 1759006/Principal Investigator, Dr. Lauren Birney. The mission is to provide information on a global scale to stimulate networks and communities in Environmental Restoration Science to connect and communicate with one another, as shown in Figure 1.; Funding text 2: The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor (BOP-CCERS) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported initiative and collaboration of multiple institutions and organizations led by Pace University and is in collaboration with New York City Public Schools. This large-scale project, Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), generated a large amount of data through programming that engaged both teachers and students. The BOP-CCERS\u2019 model engages over 5600 of New York City\u2019s 1.1 million public school students. This article presents the third part to a large data collection study (Birney et al., 2021b, 2022) with focus on Underrepresented Minority (URM) student interest in STEM and engagement with teachers to support them in teaching STEM through experiential learning and lessons that connect STEM to the real world, particularly through science in the New York City Harbor. The first component of the study focused on Underrepresented Minority (URM) student interest in STEM (Birney et al., 2021b). The second component of the study focused on teacher engagement in the program, and what the researchers had learned in the process (Birney et al., 2022).; Funding text 3: The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor (BOP-CCERS) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported initiative and collaboration of multiple institutions and organizations led by Pace University and is in collaboration with New York City Public Schools. This large-scale project, Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), generated a large amount of data through programming that engaged both teachers and students. This article presents the third part to the study with focus on the Digital Platform and results from the student Symposium presentations. Part 1 focused on Underrepresented Minority (URM) student interest in STEM as motivated by the original project. Part 2 focused on URM student engagement with teachers to support students in teaching science through experiential learning and lessons that connect science to the real world, particularly through science in the New York Harbor. Moreover, the second part of the study focused on teacher engagement in the program, and what the researchers had learned in the process. The third aspect of the study, and primary focus on this paper, had found additional positive results cited by the teachers in the study both using the Digital Platform and after the project outcomes from the student Symposium presentations.