Building Data Infrastructure for NYC FIRST: An Educational Third Space for STEM
Written by Jinsook Lee
How can we build data systems that help young people thrive in STEM?
New York City’s educational landscape is full of afterschool programs, classrooms, and community hubs, but NYC FIRST’s growing network of STEM Centers occupies a unique position: it is a “third space” – not quite school, not quite home, but a vibrant, in-between environment where students, mentors, and community members collaborate, take risks, and discover their STEM identities (Bhabha, 1994; Beal, 2024).
For students who may struggle in traditional classrooms, the STEM Center offers robotics, coding, and hands-on tinkering that nurture both technical skills and confidence. Teachers recognize this power: “So many of my struggling students were so engaged and excited to participate!” was a sentiment shared by a teacher participating in NYC FIRST’s districtwide programming in robotics. This balance of joy, rigor, and belonging is what makes the STEM Centers transformative—and what inspired my work as a Siegel Family Endowment PiTech Impact Fellow in Summer 2025.
My Fellowship Focus: Turning Stories into Systems
While NYC FIRST’s impact is deeply visible to students and educators, much of it has historically lived in stories and testimonials. To strengthen NYC FIRST’s ability to tell that story with data, my fellowship focused on assessing how information is currently collected and analyzed, and how we can design a more unified, long-term system.
Working alongside Chief of Staff Kate Karageorgiou and the NYC FIRST team, I examined how data is gathered across surveys, attendance logs, and program records. Our goal was to understand how these processes could better reflect NYC FIRST STEM Centers’ identity as a “third space” for equity and innovation.
What I Learned
I found evidence of both strong existing practices and meaningful opportunities for NYC FIRST to deepen its system-level impact:
The STEM Center is a vital third space.
It supports identity development, informal learning, and relationship-building beyond what schools typically measure. Students build leadership as well as technical skills, and teachers see it as a transformative supplement to classrooms, connecting directly to NYC FIRST’s mission of expanding equitable access to STEM education.The data ecosystem is growing rapidly.
NYC FIRST has collected valuable records—from pre- and post-surveys to STEM card attendance logs—but the systems were designed for local projects, not yet for long-term, network-wide learning. This creates an opportunity to develop a more robust infrastructure that can support NYC FIRST’s continued growth.Early analyses reveal both promising insights and areas for refinement.
Student surveys showed measurable learning gains in engineering design, CAD, and documentation skills, and reflections pointed to deeper social-emotional growth around collaboration and perseverance. At the same time, some datasets such as attendance logs and competition records, highlighted the need for more consistent data collection methods and shared identifiers. These analyses clarified where NYC FIRST can strengthen the systems that make that impact more visible and verifiable.Building toward evidence that matches the scale of impact.
The work reaffirmed that NYC FIRST’s influence on young people is already profound, but fully demonstrating it requires data infrastructure that keeps pace with that growth.
By addressing current constraints (e.g., fragmented records and varied survey instruments), NYC FIRST can move from anecdotal success to longitudinal and evidence-based storytelling that informs policy and practice citywide.
Why This Matters
Data, when used thoughtfully, is not about reducing learning to numbers. It is about making the invisible visible. It can show how a late-night tinkering session leads to a robotics breakthrough, how mentorship bonds fuel persistence, and how informal learning builds confidence and belonging.
As NYC FIRST expands its network of STEM Centers and partnerships with schools, libraries, and other civic organizations, a unified data infrastructure can help ensure that every student’s journey is visible, supported, and celebrated.
Designing a Way Forward
Through my analysis, I proposed several steps for building infrastructure that honors the NYC FIRST STEM Centers’ identity as a “third space”:
Develop a unified relational database to capture both structured and informal learning experiences, integrating students, mentors, alumni, programs, informal engagements, and outcomes.
Strengthen evaluation tools including standardized surveys and validated instruments (like TRI-STEM for teachers).
Pursue a phased hiring plan that starts with a full-time data engineer to centralize and govern data, then a data analyst to turn survey and attendance log data into insights and KPIs, and eventually a data scientist to support predictive modeling and personalized student insights.
Leverage holistic analytics to move from descriptive reporting to predictive, personalized support that helps each young person thrive.
Together, these steps would help NYC FIRST STEM Centers function as a coherent, evidence-based ecosystem that not only offers hands-on learning as third spaces but also contributes to research, policy, and equity efforts across the city.
Jinsook Lee
Ph.D. Student, Information Science, Cornell University
Looking Ahead
Beyond my fellowship, NYC FIRST is taking exciting next steps to finalize the relational database design, piloting improved survey instruments, and continuing partnerships with civic institutions, including New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), to evaluate programming at scale.
Together, these steps would help NYC FIRST STEM Centers function as a coherent, evidence-based ecosystem that not only offers hands-on learning as “third spaces,” but also contributes to research, policy, and equity efforts across the city.
I am grateful to the PiTech Initiative and NYC FIRST for the opportunity to contribute to this work and bridge academic research and real-world practice. It has been inspiring to collaborate with educators and partners committed to equity, and I am excited to see how the NYC FIRST STEM Centers’ role as a “third space” will continue to shape NYC’s STEM pipeline in the years ahead.
References
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Beal, J. (2024, September 24). What are third places and why do they matter? Albert Shanker Institute. https://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/what-are-third-places-and-why-do-they-matter