Lucas Vasconcelos

Hello! I am Lucas Vasconcelos, Assistant Professor of Educational Technology at University of South Carolina. You can click "view my portfolio" above to see my CV with detailed information.

My research agenda focuses on designs that use technologies to improve STEM teaching and learning. I have been an active collaborator in RoboSTEM, a project that investigates the impact of educational robotics on pre-service early childhood education teachers’ learning and STEM lesson design. I am also a member of Play2Learn, a research team that designs and implements culturally-sensitive scaffolds for pre-service teachers’ learning to debug code errors through an NSF-funded iUSE grant. I have collaborated with professors and fellow PhD students in qualitative and mixed-methods study design, data collection and analysis, manuscript writing, and dissemination of results at national and international conferences.

For my dissertation study, I have designed and developed Coding in Scientific Modeling Lessons (CS-ModeL), which is an instructional module and online system to scaffold science teachers’ learning to create simulations with block-based coding and to integrate coding into scientific modeling lessons. This research is significant because it adds to a scarce literature on how to use coding to support scientific modeling and prepares teachers for interdisciplinary STEM teaching and learning.

=> STEM teaching and learning research

=> block-based coding and computational thinking

=> simulations and scientific modeling

=> educational robotics

=> instructional scaffolding

=> equity and culturally-sensitive pedagogies