The Pelehonuamea Project: Connecting Indigenous Hawaiian History and Computational Geoscience in Teaching Volcanism

Computational geoscience is used for volcanic risk assessment and hazard mitigation for Hawaiians. However, few students in Hawai’i have the opportunity to use computer science and computational thinking for authentic scientific inquiry in geoscience. To address the need for increased learning opportunities that engage Indigenous Hawaiian students in a locally relevant curriculum that meets both state science and computer science, the project brings together STEM education researchers, middle school teachers, students, community members, and geoscientists in a research-practice partnership to co-design a technology-rich integrated geoscience and computer science curriculum focused on volcanic risks and hazards.

A unique aspect of this project is that it leverages and amplifies the voices of Indigenous Hawaiian middle school students and their families in the curriculum co-design process, thus contributing to a sense of ownership of and investment in STEM learning. Specifically, the project involves co-designing a curriculum module that integrates Hawaiian oral histories and current lived experiences of volcanic eruptions with Western scientific knowledge about volcanology.

Middle school students will use block coding to conduct simulation-based investigations about volcanic hazards and risks. The project will research how experiencing a culturally- and geographically-relevant integrated geoscience and computer science curriculum module affects students’ attitude towards computer science and computational thinking, and to what extent students build computer science and geoscience knowledge.

The project goal is to broaden Indigenous Hawaiian students’ sense of agency and educational relevance in computing and geoscience to better prepare them for diverse job opportunities in STEM fields.

This project expands on an existing Research-Practice Partnership to include middle school students in the co-design of a technology-rich integrated geoscience and computer science curriculum module focused on volcanic risks and hazards. The co-design effort engages all members of the partnership in curriculum design, and Hawaiian students’ ethnographic studies are at the center of this effort.

Through a variety of co-design activities, students will share ethnographic stories capturing Hawaiian historical and lived knowledge about volcanic eruptions, and the project team will engage with students to align their ethnographic stories with the computational geoscience activities planned. The students’ stories will contextualize the computer science, computational thinking, and geoscience learning.

The project builds upon previously developed software to create a computational model that will allow students to use visual block-based coding to model lava eruptions from the Mauna Loa volcano. Students will use computational thinking skills and computer science practices to model and explore the environmental variables that influence the volcanic lava flow system, define the relationships among pertinent environmental factors, create visualizations of lava flow from a volcanic vent, and analyze the data produced by the model.

Through two cycles of Design-Based Implementation Research, the project explores how the co-design process supports students’ sense of agency and educational relevance, how a culturally- and geographically-relevant integrated computer science geoscience curriculum module can affect students’ attitude towards computer science and computational thinking, and to what extent students build computer science, computational thinking, and geoscience knowledge. Situated in the design-based implementation research approach, the project employs Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and uses a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis, including observations, interviews, a computational geoscience reasoning measure, student log data including their use of block coding, and instruments to assess how students perceive personal, contextual, and future relevance of computational geoscience content.

This project is funded through the Computer Science for All: Research and RPPs program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.