Geometry Playground created by The Exploratorium, playground designers Landscape Architecture, Inc., the Science Museum of Minnesota, Brooklyn Children's Museum, Sciencenter-Ithaca, and Science Works-Ashland is a 4,500-square foot traveling exhibition that includes immersive, table-top hands-on and electronic game elements on spatial and mathematical learning (Shape Garden, Surface City and Pattern Jungle); outdoor versions of selected exhibits from the full exhibition for public and school playgrounds and museums; and a Web site optimized for Web-enabled mobile phones.
Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, CA, will develop a three-pronged project called "Round and Round" focused on the geometry, science and technology of circles and wheels. All three project products (one permanent and one traveling version of a 2000-sq. ft. exhibition; an array of complementary educational programs for children ages 3-10; and published research on patterns of interactions among families of diverse backgrounds in museum settings) will be developed in cooperation with developmental psychologists from the University of California at Santa Cruz and advisors from Latino and Vietnamese communities in San Jose. "Round and Round" exhibits and programs will offer a trans-cultural, gender-neutral, and multi-disciplinary look at the ingenuity and ubiquity of circles. Together they will provide a comprehensive array of interactive experiences that help children, ages 3-10, and adults explore the mathematics, physics, physical properties and engineering advantages of circles and wheels. The project is expected to serve three million visitors in science and children's museums across the nation within four years of implementation.
The Scientific Reasoning Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will conduct a feasibility study for engaging museum visitors in data analysis through this planning grant. Intellectual Merit: This project builds on the extensive prior work of the PI in developing Tinkerplots software for middle school students. At the same time, it potentially takes advantage of the many museum exhibitions that include various kinds of data but provide no mechanisms for visitors to analyze the data and draw conclusions. This project makes the connection by seeking to demonstrate the proof of concept for the transfer of this data analysis program from the formal to the informal setting. Broader Impact: This project will purposefully test three very different settings -- Museum of Science, Boston, MA; Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, MA; and Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO -- to explore the advantages and limitations of this approach in those learning environments. If successful, the software could have very wide application.
This project will research distributed, online fantasy basketball games, which are quite popular with many kinds of players, including informal science education under-represented groups, and which entail some degree of informal statistical reasoning and decision-making strategies. The game is not playing basketball per se, but taking on the role of a team owner or coach who needs to decide how best to compose a team given necessarily limited resources. The research team will provide a method for framing and researching statistical understanding and decision making of expert and novice players, then, based on the research, will develop scaffolded techniques for helping players become more reflective on and adept with the statistical knowledge and decision making strategies they use.
The Exploratorium will develop "The Electronic Guidebook: Extending Museum Experience Using Networked Handheld Computers." Through this project, the Exploratorium and the Concord Consortium will investigate the use of new technologies to enhance the learning experience of science museum visitors. The exponentially increasing availability of portable personal computing devices provides an opportunity for science museums to develop new ways for visitors to experiment and interact with exhibits. The partners will design and prototype a museum-based "Electronic Guidebook" for visitors. Twenty-five Exploratorium exhibits will be connected to a museum network and handheld portable computers through infrared connections. The target audiences for this project are the general public (adults and families) and children in the K-12 age range. The primary disciplinary focus is physics, with a secondary focus on mathematics.
This 12-month planning grant will create the foundation for a project based on meaningful, online, game-based learning. Specifically, it will enable the proposer to develop and validate story lines and game characters with middle-school aged children in two summer design institutes. In addition, the proposer will build partnerships with museums and informal learning institutions and develop a plan to work with these partners for the dissemination, promotion, use and evaluation of the future games. Intellectual Merit: The project will develop standards-linked design specifications for play scenarios, game characters and real-world, problem-based activities across STEM domains. These design specifications should be of significant value for future educational game development. Children will serve as "informants" during game design, providing input where most effective. This involvement in the planning process is critical to the success of the games, and should ensure the desired "kid appeal." Broader Impact: The strategy of involving advisory groups of children, including those at-risk, will allow the project to factor in ways to engage audiences underrepresented in the sciences by tailoring characters and activities that ensure broad appeal. In addition, the approach of solving puzzle-like problems embedded in a game's story narrative should appeal to both boys and girls. This project will generate a report for publication on the design process and resulting specifications.
Digital image processing offers several possible new approaches to the teaching of a variety of mathematical concepts at the middle-school and high-school levels. There is reason to believe that this approach will be successful in reaching some "at-risk" students that other approaches miss. Since digital images can be made to reflect almost any aspect of the real world, some students may have an easier time taking an interest in them than they might with artificial figures or images resulting from other graphics- oriented approaches. Using computer-based tools such as image processing operators, curve-fitting operators, shape analysis operators, and graphical synthesis, students may explore a world of mathematical concepts starting from the psychologically "safe" territory of their own physical and cultural environments. There is reason to hope that this approach will be particularly successful with students from diverse backgrounds, girls and members of minority groups, because the imagery used in experiments can easily be tailored to individual tastes. The work of the project consists of creating detailed designs of the learning modules, implementing them on microcomputers, and evaluating their effectiveness in a variety of ways, using trials with students at Rainier Beach High School, which is an urban public high school having an ethnically diverse student body and a Macintosh computer laboratory.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Steven TanimotoMichele LeBrasseurJames King
Many informal science and mathematics education projects employ multiple media, assuming that educational benefits will extend beyond those of a single medium. However, this assumption has not been tested empirically in a comprehensive way. This research uses Cyberchase (a multiple-media, informal mathematics project for 8- to 11-year-olds) to investigate synergy among multiple media components and how they interact to yield cumulative educational outcomes. Research questions: (1) How does mathematics learning from multiple media differ from learning from a single medium? (2) What outcomes derive from engagement with different types of media and what types of synergy occur? (3) How can reliable research methods be developed to assess contributions of individual media and their interactions? (4) How can informal education projects capitalize on the strengths of each medium? (5) How can media components be designed and employed to best complement each other? The research has four phases: (1) Preparatory - Recruit participants nationally with parental consent. Finalize methods and measures. (2) Naturalistic - Track naturalistic use of various Cyberchase media among 600-800 third and fourth graders. Assess mathematical problem solving and attitudes toward math. (3) Experimental - Establish causality by assigning a subset of the participants (N = 300-400) to several experimental conditions that are exposed to different combinations of Cyberchase media. Measure change in attitudes and problem solving from pretest to posttest. (4) Analysis - Employ appropriate regression and model fitting analyses to analyze the naturalistic and experimental data, and to synthesize the two. Because of the paucity of relevant existing research, this research will shed light on the educational impact of Cyberchase and on the design and assessment of multiple-media approaches to informal STEM education overall. It will advance our theoretical understanding of children's informal mathematics learning - specifically, how children learn from various media, what strengths each medium brings to bear, and what synergy might exist among media - and inform the best practice design and evaluation of future informal projects that use multiple media.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shalom FischRichard LeshVincent MelfiSandra CrespoSandra Sheppard
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a two-year planning project that will support planning activities to provide a basis for further STEM education reform in the Greater Mohawk Valley of New York. These include different workshops for school administrators and teachers preparing them to support student research and venues for students to present the results of their research. Perhaps even more importantly it will provide an alternative path for assessment of districts' STEM educational goals. The 25 years of Utica College's support and programming of student research activities will provide a rich background for assessment of the effectiveness of student learning in science, mathematics and technology through such activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lawrence Aaronson
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The "Setting A Research Agenda: Parents as Informal Mathematics Educators" conference will convene parents, researchers in parent/child learning, a methodological/research design expert, a developmental psychologist, and representatives from mathematics professional organizations. The goals of the conference include: 1) summarizing the goals, methods and findings of the leading research in parent/child mathematics learning; 2) establishing the agenda for future research in this area; and 3) charting a short- and long-term plan of action to accomplish these research goals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Janice MokrosMarlene Kliman
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This exploratory study is designed to determine attributes of large urban school districts which would maximize the probability of success for implementing and sustaining major educational reforms. The study will include personal interviews with key change agents in a number of such school districts where changes have been attempted and will identify attributes which lead to failure as well as those which lead to success. The project will culminate with a draft document of an "Urban School District Systemic Reform Initiative in Science and Mathematics" which incorporates findings, in NSF solicitation format.
This report presents the findings from a front-end evaluation of 1, 2, 3 Ready? Set. Go!, conducted by Randi Korn & Associates (RK&A) for the Minnesota Children's Museum. 1, 2, 3 Ready? Set. Go! is a traveling exhibition that will visit both libraries and children's museums across the country. The exhibition is being developed by the Minnesota Children's Museum in collaboration with the American Library Association to engage children 2 through 7 years and their parents in exploring math through hands-on, book-based math activities.