technological innovations for inclusive learning & teaching

SportSense

Recent estimates suggest that 70% of youth participate in sports, whereas fewer than 20% participate in out-of-school STEM experiences. The SportSense project imagines how unlocking new curiosities within athletes could transform the landscape of STEM learning, both in terms of who participates and types of innovations that emerge. In partnership with local organizations, we create learning environments where students are introduced to ways that technology can help them improve their athletic performance, and ways that sports can improve their understanding of STEM concepts. We provide participants the opportunity to explore statistical questions that are meaningful to them, with tools such as wearables, Python statistical packages, and R programming tools prominently used by data scientists. This project is also being used within the Black Kids Predict Initiative.

Tools and Repositories Used Across Activities

Sample SportSense Curriculum Materials

  1. The Power of Sensors
  2. The Promise of Wearables
  3. Take Off That Silly Watch
  4. Designers Wanted
  5. Limitations with Wearables and Sensors
  6. Design Your Future

Putting Multimodal Tools in the Hands of Youth

Linked Speaker Events

Bridging Between Expansive Learning Environments and MMLA

READ

Publications from This Project

Worsley, M., Quiterio, A., Kumar, V., Smith, M., Bodon, H., & Butler, M. (2025). SportSense: Engaging youth in data science experience in in-school and out-of-school K-12 contexts. Proceedings of the 2025 Data Science Education K-12: Research to Practice Conference.

Quiterio, A., & Worsley, M. (2025). Toward Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Exploring Computer Science and Sports Perceptions of Student-Athletes. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (AERA 2025).

DOI

Lee, A., Quiterio, A., Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2025). Athletic Tinkering: Playful Computing Learning at the Intersection of Sports and Technology. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2025), pp. 2650-2652. ISLS.

DOI

Quiterio, A. & Smith, M. (2024). Data Informed Learning for Equity: Empowering Volunteer Coaches in Youth Basketball Leagues. Proceedings of the 2024 RESPECT Annual Conference, pp. 139-142.

Quiterio, A., Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2024). When Athletes Play Around Technology - A Sporting Approach to Computing Inquiry. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (LDT '24), pp. 30-37.

Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2023). Scratch for sports: athletic drills as a platform for experiencing, understanding, and developing AI-driven apps. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 37, No. 13, pp. 16011-16016).

PDF DOI

Wallace, A., Quiterio, A., Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2023). How Youth Connect Sports with Technology. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1351.

PDF DOI

Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2023, June). PaintBall - Coding Sports Into Art for Cross-Interest Computational Connections. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 713-715.

PDF DOI

Wallace, A., Quiterio, A., Kumar, V., & Worsley, M. (2023). Culturally responsive computing for black boys through sports technology. In Blikstein, P., Van Aalst, J., Kizito, R., & Brennan, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2023 (pp. 1426-1429). International Society of the Learning Sciences.

PDF DOI

Clegg, T., Edouard, K., Greene, D., Jones, S., Melo, N., Nasir, N. I., ... & Zimmermann-Niefield, A. (2020). Reconceptualizing Legitimate and Generative Learning Experiences in Sports and Technology.

PDF

Jones, S. T., Thompson, J., & Worsley, M. (2020). Data in Motion: Sports as a site for expansive learning. Computer Science Education, 30(3), 279-312.

PDF