Steven Worker is a University of California 4-H Youth Development Advisor for Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties (north of San Francisco, California). He conducts extension, education, and applied research around youth development, informal STEM and computer science education, and volunteer development. His emphases are adapting, piloting, evaluating 4-H program models to be culturally relevant and engage marginalized youth; empower youth through consequential STEM & CS learning; and support volunteers in improving their practices to improve program quality.
Dr. Worker is a Co-PI on the California 4-H Computer Science Pathway grant (2018-2021 from Google), an effort to expand computer science education to California young people. See national 4-H computer science; or Kids Code Summer 2019 evaluation report.
Dr. Worker is leading an emerging project to explore develop, test, and evaluate, a computer science (CS) curriculum to spiral CS concepts through unplugged, block-coding, and micro:bit design activities, intended to strengthen young people’s computational thinking and motivation for continued CS learning. To engage underrepresented youth, the curriculum will integrate a pedagogical emphasis on positive ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development through culturally relevant learning experiences.
