Choice and autonomy are central tenets of interest-driven learning. Yet, in most studies on interest in school, students' choice and autonomy have been confined within the boundaries of the curriculum and the subject matter in question. This limits our understanding of how schools can support interest-driven learning as well as students' interest development in educational settings more broadly. To address this gap, in this study, we have focused on student learning when they are allowed to follow their interests beyond the curriculum during school time. Building on relational and practice-based perspectives on interest, we conceptualized such extensions as productive deviations and centered on a particular case of two 6th-grade students - Tamaz and Nuri - who created two computer games during their time in the FUSE Studio, alternative STEAM learning infrastructure for schools. Our interactional analysis of Tamaz and Nuri's problem-solving during their game-making shows that their productive deviation formed a significant learning experience for them in terms of game design and working with computers. Overall, our study contributes to discussions on fostering and supporting students' interest-driven learning and interest development in school settings.

This study examines: (1) dilemmas experienced by teachers adapting to the role of 'facilitator' in a student-centered, technology-supported, STEAM learning environment; (2) strategies they implemented to address them; and (3) students' responses. Data sources included interviews and video-ethnographic, classroom observations with 29 teachers and 325 students, from 20 schools across the United States. Using thematic coding, we identified eight dilemmas and three types of strategies facilitators used to address them. We discuss students' responses to strategies. Findings have implications for understanding how teachers might best facilitate STEAM learning activities and for our understanding of how teachers adapt to educational change.

Students' interest pathways are fashioned not only from existing educational resources and opportunities, but importantly also by extending beyond them. In this study, we conceptualise these extensions as productive deviations and engage in a comparative analysis of various productive deviations we have identified in our ethnographic study of seven 5th and 6th grade FUSE Studios - an alternative learning infrastructure for schools. Our analysis shows that the deviations can vary from short term excursions to semester-long projects and can also become the focus of other students' interests.

In an era of high-stakes testing and performance demands that regulate future educational opportunities and affect how schools are managed and funded, failure can easily become stigmatized in the practices of schooling. In turn, it can lead students to avoid activities in which they can be evaluated as failing. As researchers, if we wish to help students recognize the value of failure in the process of learning and to capitalize on failures as significant learning opportunities, we must find ways in which failure at school can be reframed as something productive, rather than punitive. In this study, we investigated how student experience in a FUSE Studio-an alternative infrastructure for learning in schools organized around principles of student choice and interest (Stevens et al., 2016)- support a different, more productive 'use' of failure. Our study is an investigation of how failure was framed in the FUSE Studio by students and teachers and whether these participants recognized learning from failure as a productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. Our analysis, which was based on a year-long video ethnography conducted in a typical FUSE Studio, revealed two distinct ways in which failure was framed. In addition, an analysis of participant interviews highlighted that the students and a facilitator viewed failure as a significant and productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. In sum, the study contributes to the existing literature on the value of failure for learning, by highlighting a way that failure can be framed as being productive for both students and teachers.

This study examines the role of spatial reasoning in learning among 5th and 6th grade students participating in a set of in-school, technology-enhanced, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) making activities. We focus our analysis on a particular type of reasoning: spatial reasoning. Prior research has shown that spatial reasoning is relevant for problem-solving, participation, and achievement in STEAM disciplines. However, the literature on spatial reasoning lacks qualitative analyses of the processes through which spatial reasoning is learned, enacted, and leads to problemsolving insights, particularly in everyday learning contexts. Spatial reasoning is also underemphasized and undervalued in our schools. And although increasingly popular, hands-on, making activities have the potential to cultivate spatial skills, spatial reasoning has been largely ignored in the literature on learning through making. Informed by a distributed cognitive perspective and using a combination of qualitative categorical coding and interaction analysis, this study provides a qualitative analysis of the relation between spatial reasoning and learning through making. Our analyses show that during making activities, students engaged in frequent and diverse spatial reasoning with a variety of social and material resources and that the social and material contexts of different making activities facilitated different types of spatial reasoning. Our analyses also show how spatial reasoning developed over time and led to learning.

Integrated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) making activities have become increasingly popular in recent years. Many tout their benefits for STEAM interest development. However, we know relatively little about how these activities cultivate STEAM interests or about the relation between interest development and learning. This paper examines these issues in the context of one set of in-school, choice-based, STEAM making and learning environments, FUSE Studios. Drawing on sociocultural approaches to interest development, we present the case of one student's interest pathway through FUSE. By the end of the schoolyear, this student had developed an interest in and was recognized as a relative expert at 3D printing. She also connected this interest in 3D printing to a career aspiration to help cancer kids and become a doctor for them. Drawing on ethnographic observations and microanalysis of video-recordings, we trace her year-long interest pathway through FUSE to understand how her interests, in interaction with the socio-material context of FUSE, shaped her learning. We argue that the choice-based nature of FUSE allowed her to pursue her interests, organize her own learning, and consequently, cultivate STEAM interests and learning.

The Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD) is a high-throughput database currently consisting of nearly 300,000 density functional theory (DFT) total energy calculations of compounds from the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) and decorations of commonly occurring crystal structures. To maximise the impact of these data, the entire database is being made available, without restrictions, at www.oqmd.org/download. In this paper, we outline the structure and contents of the database, and then use it to evaluate the accuracy of the calculations therein by comparing DFT predictions with experimental measurements for the stability of all elemental ground-state structures and 1,670 experimental formation energies of compounds. This represents the largest comparison between DFT and experimental formation energies to date. The apparent mean absolute error between experimental measurements and our calculations is 0.096 eV/atom. In order to estimate how much error to attribute to the DFT calculations, we also examine deviation between different experimental measurements themselves where multiple sources are available, and find a surprisingly large mean absolute error of 0.082 eV/atom. Hence, we suggest that a significant fraction of the error between DFT and experimental formation energies may be attributed to experimental uncertainties. Finally, we evaluate the stability of compounds in the OQMD (including compounds obtained from the ICSD as well as hypothetical structures), which allows us to predict the existence of similar to 3,200 new compounds that have not been experimentally characterised and uncover trends in material discovery, based on historical data available within the ICSD.