This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Collaborative robots – cobots – are designed to work with humans, not replace them. What learning affordances are created in educational games when learners program robots to assist them in a game instead of being the game? What game designs work best?
Public outdoor spaces present opportunities for social experiences and learning. This Broader Implementation project will expand and evaluate a model that transforms urban public spaces into accessible and engaging environments for learning social science in outdoor public spaces. The model combines social science inquiry exhibits, place making and human facilitation of learning experiences in outdoor public areas. Project exhibits use the facilitated social interactions as both the content of and medium for the experiences. This project will adapt the existing exhibits and add new exhibits and facilitation techniques for testing in three different urban environments. Project research will explore the efficacy of these adaptations and revised facilitation techniques for the different settings in collaboration with civic partners at each site. The project will share the model and research findings widely through the Exploratorium website and publications for researchers, developers, and educators.
The team’s prior research showed that facilitators improved multiple learning outcomes with the current exhibits. Visitors acquired new social observation skills, reflected on their own experiences, perceptions, and actions, and increased their awareness for how social behavior, cognition, and emotion can be studied scientifically. Building on the prior research, the project will install the exhibition and test its efficacy in three different urban environments and explore the adaptations that are required for different settings with different civic partners. The project will use design-based research to develop a new theoretical model of facilitation strategies for supporting science learning in outdoor public spaces. For evaluation, the project will use mixed methods, including observations, interviews, surveys, and document review. Evaluation will assess success in attracting and engaging visitors; conveying social science concepts; prompting self-reflection of judgments and actions; and fostering empathy among those with different social identities. The project will assess the extent to which participants, particularly those from marginalized communities, experience feelings of belonging and inclusion. The project will be presented in three sites which represent the significant diversity, income levels, and urban environments of San Francisco. Facilitation strategies are being co-developed with Urban Alchemy, an organization that works within distressed urban communities in San Francisco. Project site partners and collaborators include the San Francisco Public Library, the Port of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Department of Parks and Recreation. The project will also measure partnership outcomes, through surveys and interviews, to look at the extent and ways the project integrates a co-creation model and develops an authentic, mutually beneficial, sustainable partnership. The project will generate and disseminate generalizable knowledge about the affordances of combining informal science learning, placemaking, and facilitation in a variety of free, outdoor STEM learning spaces in collaboration with local community groups. The project will also advance public understanding of the social and behavioral sciences.
This research project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and sssessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
Framing: Broadening participation and achieving equitable outcomes has been a core goal of the science museum field for over two decades. However, how to make progress has proven an intractable problem.
Methods: Focusing on five organizations who officially committed to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) by participating in a national professional development program, the researchers investigate how science museums attempt to enact internally-focused change via a mixed methods case study.
Findings: While these organizations considered a variety of structurally focused change
Our museum-based participatory research (PR) project was a collaboration between researchers and educators in an out-of-school time STEM education program for young people that positions STEM as a tool for community social justice. This project drew on literatures on reflective practice in museums and on research-practice partnerships. Yet following existing approaches did not work for us. Aligning research and pedagogical practices, we co-created practical, reflective, and practice-based data generation methods, calling them “embedded research practices:” context-specific, emergent methods
This brief focuses on a participatory study with the high school program of the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). Young people are organized into teams of up to 20 youth with an adult practitioner who delivers programming based on a STEM content area. Their activities and project-based learning are based in both STEM and social justice, coined in the KAYSC as “STEM Justice.”
As part of our study, we wanted to understand youth and adult needs that exist in an informal STEM education program that weaves equity into its core. This brief
The theory of “science capital” is increasingly showing up in formal and informal science education. Both face the common challenge of what is often called a “theory/practice divide”: academic theory not seeming relevant to the day-to-day needs and practices of educators.
This brief shares what happened when practitioners and researchers working with the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) at the Science Museum of Minnesota took both theory and practice seriously, reclaiming terms and ideas in service of our work and communities. It explores how an informal science learning (ISL)
This brief shares youth development insights from a museum-based, informal science learning program that uses STEM as a tool for social justice. Key to the success of this program were young people and adults feeling at home in a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive space; activities that focused on connecting and relationships; a holistically supportive space that attended to family and personal needs; shared norms for conversation and expectations; and science content grounded in young people’s lives, experiences, and communities as well as work with community members.
These needs were
PEEP Family Science is designed for parents and their three- to five-year-old children, especially those from low-income families who are served by home visiting organizations. A media-based project featuring the preschool public television science program PEEP and the Big Wide World, it includes animated stories, live-action videos with real children, hands-on science activities, and educational resources designed to support parents and home visiting educators. PEEP Family Science comes in the form of four apps, one for each science unit: ramps, colors, sounds, and shadows. Once downloaded
Media can play a critical role in engaging children, parents, and educators in science. Listen in to WGBH’s Executive Producer for PEEP, Marisa Wolsky, and children’s app developer, Jillian Orr, as they talk about the new app, PEEP FAMILY SCIENCE, that can help parents confidently engage in science with their children.
The PEEP Family Science apps were designed specifically for low-income parents and their preschool children to explore science together at home. A major issue we confronted early on in the design and development was how families would be able to access the PEEP media, which included videos from the award-winning children's show, PEEP and the Big Wide World. Many of the families we tested the apps with did not have reliable internet connections. We initially made the decision to choose an app format instead of a website to help bridge the digital divide. But the app format has also enabled us
For at-risk children who cannot attend preschool, accessing science activities depends almost entirely on parents—but many parents have limited skills for supporting such learning. PBS station WGBH has recently launched a series of free family apps based on the Emmy Award-winning preschool science series, PEEP and the Big Wide World. The apps were developed to be used jointly by parent and child for a shared learning experience. Available on Google Play and the App Store in both Spanish and English, PEEP Family Science apps cover the topics of shadows, sound, color, and ramps, respectively.
PBS has a long history of creating award-winning children’s media and has published a wide range of free educational apps. PBS stations often seek organizational partnerships for help in reaching families with the free digital resources they produce. One such collaboration is between WGBH and ALSC as we together introduce a new series of apps developed with National Science Foundation funding. These PEEP Family Science apps feature characters children love from the Emmy Award-winning preschool STEM series on public television, PEEP and the Big Wide World—combining brief, animated stories with