High concentrations of energy use from fossil fuels can lead to poor air quality, resulting in adverse health effects as well as economic consequences. A prime example is found where large numbers of idling vehicles congregate (e.g., schools and hospital drop-off/pick-up zones), leading to microclimates of unhealthy air. Workers, such as valet parking attendants, can spend their entire workday in these microenvironments, and children passing through these zones can experience up to 60% higher levels of pollution than adults, because of their height.

This project is a Smart and Connected Communities award. The community is part of Evanston, Illinois and is composed of the lead partners described below:

- EvanSTEM which is a in-school/out of school time (OST) program to improve access and engagement for students in Evanston who have underperformed or been underrepresented in STEM.

- McGaw YMCA which consists of 12,000 families serving 20,000 individuals and supporting technology and makerspace activities (MetaMedia) in a safe community atmosphere.

This Smart and Connected Community (SCC) project will partner with two rural communities to develop STEMports, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning game for workforce development. The game's activities will take players on localized Augmented Reality (AR) missions to both engage in STEM learning challenges and discover emerging STEM careers in their community, specifically highlighting innovations in the fields of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, forest products, and renewable energy.

Smart services are deeply embedded in modern cities aiming to enhance various aspects of citizens' lives, including safety, wellness, and quality of life. Examples include intelligent traffic control and air quality control. Given these services, monitoring a city's safety and performance collectively is crucial, yet also challenging due to many potential conflicts among the number increasing of services deployed. Researchers have accumulated abundant knowledge on how to design these services independently.

The goal of this project is to further the ability of cities and communities to deploy technology that saves lives through safer transportation systems. The approach is to create open source analytics solutions to enable novel transportation applications that utilize data from low-cost video sensors. Video data are processed using edge computing (inexpensive computing hardware that performs analysis without storing significant amounts of data) in order to reduce the amount of data stored.

The National Science Foundation supports a wide variety of valuable technical and social civic innovation through its CIVIC Innovation Challenge and Smart and Connected Communities. While many of these

Texas coastal communities have historically been exposed to environmental threats from natural and industrial sources. In Ingleside on the Bay (IOB), a small, rural community situated along the shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay, tropical storms and high rates of relative sea-level rise cause extreme and nuisance flooding, while industrial expansion is placing stress on the community’s way of life and the natural resources upon which it relies.

Detained youth are a population that experience disparities in educational opportunities and in particular, have systemically fewer rich opportunities for STEM learning. Access to educational resources and STEM learning for detained youth are critical to position them to have marketable employment skills and potentially contribute to the STEM workforce of the future.

Lack of participation in the digital economy is an impediment to societal well-being and production which asymmetrically affects rural communities. The literature indicates that technological availability (e.g., broadband) is only a part of the problem: rural communities are not as active as their urban counterparts in technology adoption.