Click! Urban Adventure Game was a mixed-reality role-playing game where girls worked in teams to solve a fictional mystery based on a real-world issue, using technology and science to conduct their investigation. In this article we describe the design of the experience and present evidence that the game increased girls’ confidence, interest, and knowledge of science and technology and helped to build a community of support and conversation-centred learning for girls. This example has implications for the design of informal learning experiences that bridge interest and identity with science and
Museum professionals' increased focus on visitors in recent years has been demonstrated by, among other things, the enhanced practice of evaluation and the development of interpretive plans. Yet too often, these efforts function independent of one another. This book helps museums integrate visitors' perspectives into intepretive planning by recognizing, defining, and recording desired visitor outcomes throughout the process. The integration of visitor studies in the practice of interpretive planning is also based on the belief that the greater our understanding, tracking, and monitoring of
Complex ideas like evolution—which run counter to common, but mistaken, intuitive knowledge—are challenging, both for exhibit developers and for the evaluation and research teams who assess the impact of exhibitions. It is always difficult to document measurable changes in deep conceptual understanding following a single visit to an exhibition; Is this even possible with complex topics, such as evolution? In this article, we summarize a series of studies that may offer some help to exhibit developers and evaluators, as well as others who design and assess informal learning experiences. The
A recent collaboration between the production staff of DragonflyTV and 29 institutions of informal science learning pushed beyond the traditional roles of museum-media partnerships by engaging museum professionals in the production of television content and featuring the partner institutions on the TV show. The 14 DragonflyTV episodes produced as part of these partnerships were subtitled "DragonflyTV GPS: Going Places in Science" and were produced over two production seasons. The collaborations involved both large and small institutions, including hands-on science centers and natural history
Concord Evaluation Group (CEG), led by Dr. Christine Paulsen, was hired by WGBH to perform an evaluation of NOVA’s Making Stuff Season 2 series (MS2), website, and outreach activities. CEG also conducted a separate set of formative evaluation activities during the early stages of resource development. The findings from the formative evaluation have been delivered separately. The goal of the summative evaluation was to explore the extent to which MS2 activities were successful at achieving NOVA’s intended impacts: 1. To increase public understanding that basic research leads to technological
This document is a “think piece” about why and how informal science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education institutions could be placing amusing, novel experiences in people’s paths to create memorable STEM experiences embedded in their everyday lives. The report focuses on what we learned about creating interactive STEM exhibits in public spaces outside of a science center. That said, the content can inform hands-on learning experiences on other topics, as well, within the limits outlined.
The Saint Louis Science Center (SLSC) project Bridging Earth and Mars (BEAM) will engage the general public and children from schools and community groups with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) exploration of Mars through exhibits simulating control of robotic rovers on the surface of Mars as well as related educational programming. This front-end evaluation for BEAM youth programs provides information to the BEAM project team about the levels of knowledge, attitudes, and skills among low-income and minority young people who are part of the field trip workshop
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Saint Louis Science CenterCarey Tisdal
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The "community of practice" (CoP) has emerged as a potentially powerful unit of analysis linking the individual and the collective because it situates the role of learning, knowledge transfer, and participation among people as the central enterprise of collective action. The authors’ surface tensions and highlight unanswered questions regarding CoP theory, concluding that it relies on a largely normative and underoperationalized set of premises. Avenues for theory development and the empirical testing of assertions are provided.
From October 1965 to May 1966, the Science Museum in London displayed the American spacecraft Freedom 7, the first capsule in NASA’s Mercury programme to take a human on a suborbital flight. Archival records concerning this temporary display are extensive and contain photographic sources as well as written ones. This case therefore lends itself to a study aimed at evaluating the comparative merits of these two types of records, for understanding the logic at play in the display, and for retrieving at least part of the visitors’ experience. Visual sources emerge from this comparison as
Rockman et al (REA), in partnership with Marti Louw and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), conducted a summative evaluation in Fall 2012-Spring 2013 of a temporary museum exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in Pittsburgh, PA called, Stories in the Rock. The exhibition highlighted CMNH researchers’ documentation of ancient petroglyph sites in Saudi Arabia using GigaPan technology to capture high-resolution, zoomable images of the rock art. The exhibition centers around an activity called the Explorable Image, a
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University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School EnvironmentsCamellia Sanford-Dolly
Rockman et al (REA), in partnership with Marti Louw and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) conducted a summative evaluation in Summer 2014 of an aquatic macroinvertebrate digital teaching collection (macroinvertebrates.org) containing voucher specimens from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in Pittsburgh, PA. The digital teaching collection groups three orders of aquatic insects (stoneflies, caddisflies, and mayflies), and users can click on a specific insect and get information on its genus, habitat, behaviors, size, abundance
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University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School-Environments (UPCLOSE)Camellia Sanford-Dolly
Situated in the shade of palm trees in the Miami, FL area, the REM Learning Center serves children aged 12 months to nine years. By having two dedicated Maker Corps Members during the summer, they could increase the number of visits children had to the "Play, Make, Share" studio, continue to experiment with different materials and facilitation strategies, and begin to build the expertise of their staff.