Technology Education
For Women In Transition
About AISL Women In Transition
The Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program’s Innovation development track aims to broaden participation in STEM education among underserved populations through innovative and inclusive approaches to technology education.
The program is designed to enhance knowledge and comfort with technology and to develop computational thinking among women who were formerly incarcerated and are now seeking to reenter the workforce or adjust to their lives outside the criminal justice system (“women in transition”) in the Midwest.
Why the AISL Women's Program
While women have become the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population, prison education and reentry programs are not well prepared to respond to this influx. Women in transition are rarely exposed to STEM education and they are generally isolated from the digital world while in prison. Consequently, they face post-incarceration challenges in accessing and using rapidly changing digital technologies. Against this backdrop, the AISL project was designed with the aim to help women in transition in Kansas and Missouri develop STEM skills relevant to job applications and post-incarceration adjustments over a three-year period.
Our Goal
To build models of community engagement and empirical research in broadening technology education to underserved population
Problem Decomposition
Reduce the problem to a set of smaller, easier to manage, problems
Abstraction
Reduce complexity by removing unnecessary information
Pattern Recognition
Analyze and look for repeating sequences
Algorithm Design
Define logical steps to solve a problem
