WGBH has produced NOVA scienceNOW since 2005, with major funding from the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation. NOVA scienceNOW (NsN) is comprised of a science news and magazine television series, a companion website, and a science cafe outreach initiative. All NsN offerings share common goals: (a) increase public awareness and understanding of cutting edge science content, and (b) increase public engagement in science-related activities. Beginning in Season 4 of NOVA scienceNOW (NsN), WGBH increased its efforts to promote the
Summative report of permanent health science exhibition, Expedition Health, at Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The appendix of this report includes tracking-and-timing guideliens and codes and copies of cued questionnaires.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Patricia McNamaraDenver Museum of Nature & Science
"Evolution in Action: Isolation and Speciation in the Lower Congo" is a 9-minute documentary about a team of researchers working to understand what is driving the rapid evolution and speciation of fishes in the Lower Congo River. The evaluation was designed to probe the following: 1) Connection and Interest in the science content 2) Connections between the scientific story and other topics of personal interest 3) Implications of the multilingual versions for disseminating science to the public and to science educators The participants included international education students who work in
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Maritza MacdonaldAmerican Museum Natural History
The ASTA Group, LLC (ASTA) received EAGER funding (National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No. 094077) to conduct comprehensive planning for a National Initiative on Cyberlearning in K-12 Education. To ensure success, ASTA invited a diverse group of experts and stakeholders to participate in the planning process. Planning tasks included individual meetings and combined planning sessions. The planning process culminated with a 1-day workshop to synergize the preliminary information collected. ASTA produced a Summary Report synthesizing participants' ideas and recommendations to guide the
The Learning Places evaluation went beyond the traditional approach of determining how well the project met its goals. In addition to that approach, we identified grounded theory. Five areas of theory and related hypotheses emerged: STEM learning, agents of change, teens as designers, community partner engagement and national collaboration. Each is described in detail in the full report, along with findings related to each of the project goals.
The following comprise the CONCLUSIONS of SRA's evaluation: POLAR-PALOOZA toured the United States at a time when the topic of climate change and global warming appeared relatively low on a list of Americans' concerns (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2006), with the economy, war, and health care taking precedence. Nevertheless, POLAR-PALOOZA was a powerful format for engaging the public and teachers with science, while also being a rewarding and worthwhile experience for the traveling scientists. PPZA was an ambitious and complex undertaking designed to bring what is
Please Touch Museum (PTM) contracted with Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. to study their visitors' experiences and perceptions of play in the context of the Museum and its strategic priorities. Four methodologies were employed to study visitors standardized questionnaires, in-depth interviews, timing and tracking observations, and focused observations. Methodologies were selected to provide PTM with a broad picture of visitors' entire Museum experience, as well as visitors' experiences with specific exhibitions of interest. PTM's interest further extends to their adult visitors' perceptions of
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Please Touch Museum
The California Academy of Sciences contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to evaluate the exhibition Altered State: Climate Change in California. In August 2009, RK&A conducted 111 timing and tracking observations of visitors 9 years and older, and 44 group interviews with adult visitors. While observations enabled examination of time spent at individual exhibits, time spent in the exhibition as a whole, and behaviors, the interviews shed light on visitors' response to the exhibition layout, understanding of specific exhibits, learning about climate change, and affective response to
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.California Academy of Sciences
It is increasingly common for software and hardware systems to support touch-based interaction. While the technology to support this interaction is still evolving, common protocols for providing consistent communication between hardware and software are available. However, this is not true for gesture recognition – the act of translating a series of strokes or touches into a system recognizable event. Developers often end up writing code for this process from scratch due to the lack of higher-level frameworks for defining new gestures. Gesture recognition can contain a significant amount of
Modern mobile phones can store a large amount of data, such as contacts, applications and music. However, it is difficult to access specific data items via existing mobile user interfaces. In this paper, we present Gesture Search, a tool that allows a user to quickly access various data items on a mobile phone by drawing gestures on its touch screen. Gesture Search contributes a unique way of combining gesture-based interaction and search for fast mobile data access. It also demonstrates a novel approach for coupling gestures with standard GUI interaction. A real world deployment with mobile
We introduce our view of the relation between symbolic gestures and manipulations in multi-touch Natural User Interfaces (NUI). We identify manipulations not gestures as the key to truly natural interfaces. Therefore we suggest that future NUI research should be more focused on designing visual workspaces and model-world interfaces that are especially appropriate for multi-touch manipulations.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Hans-Christian JetterJens GerkenHarald Reiterer
Though many tabletop applications allow users to interact with the application using complex multi-touch gestures, automated tool support for testing such gestures is limited. As a result, gesture-based interactions with an application are often tested manually, which is an expensive and error prone process. In this paper, we present TouchToolkit, a tool designed to help developers automate their testing of gestures by incorporating recorded gestures into unit tests. The design of TouchToolkit was informed by a small interview study conducted to explore the challenges software developers face
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shahedul Huq KhandkarS. M. SohanJonathan SillitoFrank Maurer