The Knowledge Management/Eskind Biomedical Library at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center will develop a model for delivering patient-specific, consumer-friendly information that will lead to more informed patients, who are more likely to take a proactive, participatory role in their health care. The project's test bed will be My Cancer Genome (mycancergenome.org), a freely available web-based tool that provides information on tumor-based genetic mutations that can impact cancer treatment, the study of which is called pharmocogenetics. The team has selected two cancer types, melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer to demonstrate broad applicability of the model framework developed. Key project components include drafting guidelines for developing consumer-friendly educational material about pharmacogenetic principles; creating consumer-friendly pharmocogenetic content; and detailing a process for content refinement and evaluation.
Today educational activities take place not only in school but also in after-school programs, community centers, museums, and online communities and forums. The success and expansion of these out-of-school initiatives depends on our ability to document and assess what works and what doesn’t in informal learning, but learning outcomes in these settings are often unpredictable. Goals are open-ended; participation is voluntary; and relationships, means, and ends are complex. This report charts the state of the art for learning assessment in informal settings, offering an extensive review of the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay LemkeRobert LecusayMichael ColeVera Michalchik
Mobile Media Learning shares innovative uses of mobile technology for learning in a variety of settings. From camps to classrooms, parks to playgrounds, libraries to landmarks, Mobile Media Learning shows that exciting learning can happen anywhere educators can imagine. Join these educator/designers as they share their efforts to amplify spaces as learning tools by engaging learners with challenges, quests, stories, and tools for investigating those spaces.
The Science Cartoon (Sci-Toons) initiative, an informal education program, was developed to engage STEM and non-STEM students and faculty in the creation of science animation. Housed within Brown University’s Science Center, Sci-Toons projects incorporate several students and faculty each semester from both STEM and non-STEM majors. Team members are provided with technical training in animation, storytelling, and scientific concepts. The Sci-Toons model is a new approach for communicating scientific research and concepts to a broad audience via storytelling, animation, high-quality multimedia, and art.
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
Hubble Hangouts are weekly live online talks using Google+'s video hangout feature. Hubble Hangouts feature a panel of astronomers discussing the astronomical topic of the day. Viewers are encouraged to participate by asking questions in the comments sections of YouTube and Google+, or on Twitter. Hangouts are subsequently posted to YouTube for future viewing.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Space Telescope Science InstituteBonnie EisenhamerTony Darnell
This grant will support the production phase of a 90-minute film about the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted. He is known as the father of American landscape architecture; what is unknown to the viewing public is the fact that he had so many different careers, trying to reform 19th-century America in surprising ways. He succeeded mightily, changed the nation, and his concerns foretold the future. But he also struggled with failure, loss, and with despair for much of his life. The project also includes a website, five short films about Olmsted parks for web distribution, and more.
The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA), a nationally recognized history museum and library, in collaboration with institutional partners, is a grant for an ambitious Interpreting America’s Historic Places Planning Project focused on the compelling story of the early 19th century discovery of three-toed dinosaur tracks along a sixty-mile stretch of the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the deep impression these earliest American dinosaur discoveries made on ideas, art, religion, and culture in the United States. The broad public appeal of dinosaurs will engage a wide audience in the stories of the tracks’ discoverers and the first public reactions to these finds.
Overview of the Local Voices, Clever Choices Project: As part of the National Science Foundation funded "Sustainability: Promoting Sustainable Decision Making in Informal Education" project, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and its partners developed a bilingual (Spanish/English) outreach campaign- Local Voices, Clever Choices/Nuestras voces, nuestras decisiones. The goal of this and other deliverables was to promote sustainable decision making by building skills that allow participants to weigh the tradeoffs of their choices and thereby choose more sustainable practices. The
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Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryRenee B. CurtisKyrié Thompson Kellett
Investigators from the MIT Media Lab will develop and study a new generation of the Scratch programming platform, designed to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- essential skills for success in the 21st century. With Scratch, young people (ages 8 and up) can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, then share their creations with others online. Young people around the world have already shared more than 1 million projects on the Scratch community website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The new generation, called Scratch 2.0, will be fully integrated into the Internet, so that young people can more seamlessly share and collaborate on projects, access online data, and program interactions with social media. The research is divided into two strands: (1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications. (2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration. This work builds on a previous NSF grant (ITR-0325828) that supported the development of Scratch. Since its public launch in 2007, Scratch has become a vibrant online community, in which young people program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations - and, in the process, learn important computational concepts and strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating. Each day, members of the Scratch community upload nearly 1500 new Scratch projects to the website - on average, a new project almost every minute. In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation: (1) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity? (2) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity?
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won't just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity. Broader Impacts: The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a promising practice for increasing gender diversity in IT.