IRED

06/03/2026

Thanks Girl Scouts of South Carolina - Mountains to Midlands for having us at the STEM expo! We had a great time helping the girl scouts learn to code spheros to navigate through an obstacle course.

05/26/2026

Congrats to Shea Ferguson and Jennifer Harrist, who both graduated with a PhD in Educational Psychology and Research this spring!

05/18/2026

Thank you Original Six Foundation for inviting us to the 10 year anniversary celebration of O6 afterschool! This event brought together the full O6 network of partners, sponsors, board members, and supporters, including South Carolina State Superintendent Ellen Weaver and former SC Governor Nikki Haley, whose parents were among the original O6 members.

The Original Six Foundation has invested in rural and under-resourced communities and has reached more than 1,000 students across 13 schools in eight counties with structured afterschool programming for homework support, STEAM learning, character development, and workforce readiness opportunities. We are grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the amazing work the O6 foundation has done and look forward to future work together!

05/14/2026

We are so excited for the Girl Scouts of SC Mountains to Midlands STEM Expo this Saturday! We will be teaching coding and robotics through space-themed activities. Visit the link in our bio for more information.

05/06/2026

Last week, some of our lab members attended the NARST annual conference to present their research! Topics included place-based education for rural STEM classrooms, project-based STEM learning in rural education, and STEM skill obsolescence.

04/30/2026

🎉🎉 Exciting news 🎉🎉

The National Rural Education Association has launched its inaugural graduate student poster session at this year’s conference, and proposals are now live! 🎉

If you know, or are, a graduate student doing meaningful work in rural education, please share this opportunity widely.

This is just the beginning! More graduate student-focused events will be announced soon!

https://nrea.net/nfare-grad-poster-proposals-2026/

04/22/2026

IRED partnered with Cocky’s Reading Express and the Freshwater Coast Community Foundation to provide students at Westwood Elementary School an exciting morning of reading with Cocky, USC college students, and director of Cocky’s Reading Express as well as learning and reading about several STEM jobs. The event also included several other fun activities like learning the dance bees use to communicate and how lizards use push-ups to communicate. This led to push-up challenges with Cocky and the students at Westwood Elementary School were too strong!

04/20/2026

It's not too late to help Due West Robotics fund their trip to the first robotics world championship!

Note: The "tip" at the end of the contribution goes to Zeffy and does not go to the team. You are welcome to change it to $0 or customize it as you see fit.We are living a real-life inspirational movie! Yesterday, our high school robotics team from the tiny town of Due West, SC (population 1,300) ad...

04/15/2026

Congrats to Beatrice Quiroz, one of our graduate students, for winning the Innovative Idea Award at USC’s College of Education Graduate Student Research Symposium! This award recognizes research that offers novel perspectives on current issues in education. Beatrice’s work on machine learning in educational research discussed modern methods for predictive analysis of school-level teacher turnover rate.