The Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo offers a satisfying mix of interactive exhibit experiences, close-up animal viewing, and a warm, welcoming staff in a small-scale setting which makes it easily manageable for families with special needs. In recent years the JMZ has attracted and embraced this audience of often close-knit friends and organizations. In addition to an ongoing dialog with visitors at the institution, on multiple occasions JMZ has invited families to participate in community conversations to share their perspectives, experiences and suggestions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Wendy MeluchPalo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo
Long aware that people from working-class, low-income, and ethnic minority backgrounds do not visit, informal science education institutions often attribute lack of visitorship to cost or barriers to access. Dawson argues that such institutions are not inclusive due to social factors that reinforce the experience of difference, discomfort, and inaccessibility for these minority groups.
Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC), home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, is dedicated to sharing NASA content to inform, engage, and inspire students, educators, and the public. To further this goal, GLSC will develop a digital experience focused on collaboration and teamwork, emphasizing the benefits of a systems approach to STEM challenges. At the recently, fully renovated NASA Glenn Visitor Center, GLSC visitors will embark on an exciting mission of discovery, working in teams to collect real data from NASA objects and experiences. Mobile devices will become scientific tools as students, teachers, and families take measurements, access interviews with NASA scientists, analyze results from Glenn Research Center (GRC) test facilities, and link to NASA resources to assemble mission-critical information. This initiative will provide experiences that demonstrate how knowledge and practice can be intertwined, a concept at the core of the Next Generation Science Standards. GLSC’s digital missions will engage students and families in STEM topics through the excitement of space exploration. In addition, this project has the potential to inform the design of future networked visitor experiences in science centers, museums and other visitor attractions.
Discover NASA is the Discovery Museum’s endeavor to engage students in grades K through 12 as well as members of the general public in innovative space science and STEM-focused learning through the implementation of two modules: upgrades to the Challenger Learning Center, and the creation of K through 12 amateur rocketry and spacecraft design programming. The programming will be piloted at the Discovery Museum and Planetarium, and at the Inter-district Discovery Magnet School and the Fairchild-Wheeler Multi-Magnet High School, with an additional strategic partnership with the University of Bridgeport, which will provide faculty mentors to high school seniors participating in the rocketry program. Through these two modules, the Discovery Museum and Planetarium aims to foster an early interest in STEM, increase public awareness about NASA, promote workforce development, and stimulate an interest in the future of human space exploration. Both modules emphasize design methodologies and integration of more advanced space science into the STEM curriculum currently offered by Discovery Museum to visitors and public schools. The Challenger Learning Center upgrades will enable the Museum to deliver simulated human exploration experiences related to exploration of the space environment in Low Earth Orbit and simulated human exploration of Moon, Mars, and beyond, which will increase public and student awareness about NASA and the future of human space exploration. The development of an amateur rocketry and spacecraft development incubator for education, the general public, and commercial space will stimulate the development of key STEM concepts.
The New Children's Museum will launch the LAByrinth project to engage the community in the creation of a permanent art installation. The museum will convene a cross-disciplinary team to design and build the LAByrinth, a climbing structure that will serve 140,000 people annually. The museum will develop relationships with underserved families and current and future museum users, and also create an ongoing community-based exhibition development process to create sustainable mechanisms for continued community involvement. The project will introduce a new socially-engaged process for creating exhibitions, which will serve as a sustainable creative catalyst for San Diego families.
The Nurture Nature Center will conduct a community needs assessment in four Easton neighborhoods to broaden its engagement with populations at risk for natural environmental hazards. The needs assessment will discern topics of greatest concern to residents in the four neighborhoods, identify factors triggering alarm and awareness, gain a sense of general knowledge and misconceptions, learn what people want to know, and understand better how to develop comfortable ways for people to talk about problems in places where they live. The assessment process will be incorporated into the nature center's Risk to Resiliency model of community engagement and science learning about environmental hazards. This model will be applied regionally and nationally to communities that face a wide range of hazards such as flooding, wildfires, climate change, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes.
The Palo Alto Art Center is partnering with the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo to develop a series of four artist residencies, each involving an artist who explores the natural world in his or her artwork, and exhibitions of artwork created during the residencies. The museums will address the challenge of successfully integrating art and science to enhance learning in museum contexts. During each exhibition, public programming will focus on the artwork and its scientific and environmental context, engaging a broad audience in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) based activities. The project will also serve as a model demonstrating the success of education through effective collaboration between an art museum and a science museum.
The Lawrence Hall of Science will implement the "Mobile Inventor's Lab," a project to extend the benefits of an ongoing outreach program into a model that can serve visitors at a variety of locations in communities underserved by local science education organizations. The museum will refine its engineering design experiences to be easily reconfigured and delivered in a variety of locations, and develop activities and kits for library and community partner staff. This project will expand the impact of the hall's educational resources and offer audiences the opportunity to interact with and learn about engineering design experiences in their own communities.
Poets House will plan for a national project that will combine scientific knowledge with the expressive art of poetry. The planning project will lay the groundwork for a five to six city national program that will offer 1) public poetry-and-science programs at libraries and natural history museums; 2) poetry enhanced exhibits at natural history museums and libraries; and 3) self-directed learning through poetry and science resources at public libraries. The planning project will bring together experts in science, natural history museums, libraries, and poetry to share information; test-pilot public programs on both the East and West coasts, including a poetry-enhanced tour of natural history exhibits at the Oakland Museum; and determine the content, protocols and strategy for implementing a multi-city national program.
Creating Museum Media for Everyone is an NSF-funded collaborative project of the Museum of Science, the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, Ideum, and Audience Viewpoints, to further the science museum field's understanding of ways to research, develop, and evaluate digital interactives that are inclusive of all people. As a part of this effort to enable museums to integrate more accessible media into their exhibits to make them more welcoming and educational for visitors with disabilities as well as general audiences, this paper provides an overview of approaches to media accessibility
When studying museum visitors, researchers sometimes collect data by video- and audio-taping large high-traffic areas. In order to inform visitors that they are being recorded, researchers post signs in the area. This article describes the Exploratorium’s efforts to design and test trilingual signs that would effectively inform visitors when video-based research is in progress. Interviews with 255 adult museum visitors, conducted across six versions of the recording area's setup and signage, revealed several effective design elements. The posted sign was more noticeable and welcoming when it
Currently, many museums present histories of science and technology, but very few are integrating scientific activity--observation, measurement, experimentation-with the time- and place-specific narratives that characterize history-learning experiences. For the Prairie Science project, Conner Prairie is combining proven science center-style activities, developed by the Science Museum of Minnesota, with family-engagement strategies developed through extensive research and testing with audiences in historical settings. The goal of this integration is to create guest experiences that are rich in both STEM and historical content and encourage family learning. One key deliverable of this project is the Create.Connect gallery, which is currently installed at Conner Prairie. Create.Connect allows the project team to evaluate and research hands-on activities, facilitation strategies and historic settings to understand how these elements combine to encourage family conversations and learning around historical narratives and STEM content. For example, in one exhibit area families can experiment with creating their own efficient wind turbine designs while learning about the innovations of the Flint & Walling windmill manufacturing company from Indiana. The activity is facilitated by a historic interpreter portraying a windmill salesman from 1900. The interpreter not only guides the family though the process of scientific inquiry, but shares his historic perspective on wind power as well. Two other exhibit areas invite hands-on exploration of electrical circuits and forces in motion as they connect to stories from Indiana history. Evaluation and research findings from the Create.Connect exhibit will be used to develop a model that can guide other history institutions that want to incorporate STEM content and thinking into their exhibits and interpretation. By partnering with the Science Museum of Minnesota, we will combine the experience of science center professionals and history museum professionals to find the best practices for incorporating science activities into historic settings. To ensure that this dissemination model is informed from many perspectives, Conner Prairie has invited the participation of four history museums: The Museum of America and the Sea, Mystic, Connecticut; the California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento, California; the Wabash County Historical Society, Wabash, Indiana; and the Oliver H. Kelley Farm, Elk River, Minnesota. Each of the four participants will install history-STEM exhibit components which will be connected to location-specific historic narratives. Drawing on the staff experience and talents of participant museums, this project will develop realistic solutions to an array of anticipated barriers. These issues and the resulting approaches will become part of a stronger, more adaptable dissemination model that will support history museums in creating STEM-based guest experiences.