NSF FF: Planning: A Data Exploration and Storytelling Tool for Science Classrooms

Award ID: 2627588

This FINDERS Foundry award supports the creation of a tool for students to interactively explore multivariate, messy scientific data and construct data stories. Many students struggle to read graphs, explore patterns, or question results when working with real datasets. The tool will guide students as they look for trends, ask better questions, and revise their thinking. AI prompts will encourage reflection, helping students build stronger reasoning skills. An interdisciplinary leadership team including teachers and caregivers will help shape the tool so it fits classroom needs and supports deeper learning. By giving students a safe and simple way to explore data, the project aims to build confidence and prepare students for future STEM work where data skills are essential. This FINDERS Foundry award increases student understanding of real life STEM data sets through a prototype for an interactive datareasoning environment. It incorporate AIgenerated reflective prompts to guide students to reconsider and refine their own thinking and finger-gesture interface (e.g. dragging, pinching data on the screen) to make abstract data reasoning visible and tangible. The project will gather stakeholder insights, conduct codesign activities to define interface elements, and pilot prototype components in highschool classrooms. Technical work will focus on aligning scaffold sequences with a validated learning progression for data reasoning, assessing usability, and testing feasibility of key interactive and AIdriven features. The project will contribute design knowledge for embodied, AIsupported data reasoning environments that cultivate deeper student engagement with analytical practices. 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.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy