Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds. Play is fundamentally important for kids’ development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to
This planning grant addresses the issue of students losing interest in STEM during the ages of 8-12 years. The PIs propose that STEM content provided through electronic media will be more readily accepted by youth because it is on their "home turf." IMX.org will be a new, highly engaging, online destination for tweens and kids at large. It is designed to leverage the Web 2.0 and tweens' fascination with media and popular culture, and to demonstrate the connections between the real world, everyday life, and STEM. The project will test a preliminary design with a focus group of 8-12 year-olds, convene a panel of experts and Advisory Board, and create a beta Web site to conduct formative research.
Climate Change: NASA’s Eyes on the Arctic is a multi-disciplinary outreach program built around a partnership targeted at k-12 students, teachers and communities. Utilizing the strengths of three main educational outreach institutions in Alaska, the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska partnered with the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage Museum and UAF researchers to build a strategic and long lasting partnership between STEM formal and informal education providers to promote STEM literacy and awareness of NASA’s mission. Specific Goals of the project include: 1) Engaging and inspiring the public through presentation of relevant, compelling stories of research and adventure in the Arctic; 2) strengthening the pipeline of k-12 students into STEM careers, particularly those from underserved groups; 3) increasing interest in science among children and their parents; 4) increasing awareness of NASA’s role in climate change research; and 5) strengthening connections between UAF researchers, rural Alaska, and Alaska’s informal science education institutions. Each institution chose communities with whom they had prior relationships and/or made logistical sense. Through discussions analyzing partner strengths, tasks were divided; the Challenger Center taking on the role of k-12 curriculum development, the Museum of the North creating animations with data pulled from UAF research, to be shown on both in-house and traveling spherical display systems and the Anchorage Museum creating table top displays for use in community science nights. Each developed element was used while visiting the identified communities both in the classroom environment and during the community science nights.
Climate Change Education produced climate change educational experiences for both professional and general public audiences. In particular, the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), in collaboration with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, and the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), developed new content for SMM’s Earth Buzz online network, developed a climate change educational program for middle and high school teachers, invited audiences of policy- and decision-makers to SMM for climate change discussions, and recruited and mentored a climate change team of high school students through SMM’s Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center. The project goals were to increase the awareness and understanding in target audiences that (1) human activities are now surpass natural processes as driving forces of atmospheric change, (2) the behavior of Earth's atmosphere in the 21st Century will be increasingly determined by humans, and (3) human ingenuity is the key to adapting to and mitigating the climate changes underway. Highlights of the project included organizing and hosting the October 26-28, 2011 City of Saint Paul Climate Change Adaptation Scenario Planning Workshop, which catalyzed climate resilience as a city planning priority, organizing and hosting with Morris A. Ward, Inc. the October 5-6, 2012 Climate Change Science for Minnesota Broadcast Meteorologists workshop which brought together local TV and radio meteorologists with some of the best climate scientists in the U.S., helping to organize and host on November 7, 2013 the State of Minnesota’s first conference devoted exclusively to climate change adaptation, and the adoption by the museum of a public statement on climate change (www.smm.org/climatechange). The project endures although the grant has concluded through the continued delivery of the museum’s Climate Changed outreach program to a wide array of audiences and through the museum’s continued involvement with the many partnerships established during the Climate Change Education project, as exemplified by the museum working with the City of Saint Paul and Macalester College on an upcoming St. Paul Neighborhood Climate Adaptation Workshop and a Worldwide Views on Climate and Energy event (climateandenergy.wwviews.org/).
Bridging Earth and Mars (BEAM): Engineering Robots to Explore the Red Planet engages the general public and K-8 students in exhibits and programs designed to foster awareness of robotic technology, computer programming, and the challenges and opportunities inherent in NASA missions and S-STEM careers. The Saint Louis Science Center (SLSC) of St. Louis, Missouri is the lead institution and project site; partners include Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis University, the St. Louis regional FIRST Robotics organization, and the Challenger Learning Center-St. Louis. Project goals are to: 1) inform, engage, and inspire the public to appreciate NASA’s Mission by sharing findings and information about NASA’s missions to Mars; 2) ignite interest in S-STEM topics and careers for diverse K-8 students; and, 3) encourage students in grades 6-8 to sustain participation in educational experiences along the S-STEM careers pipeline. The SLSC will design and build a Martian surface and panorama where two rovers can be remotely controlled. Visitors in the McDonnell Planetarium will use controllers to program rover exploration of the Martian landscape in real-time. Visitors in SLSC’s Cyberville gallery, located one-quarter mile away across a highway-spanning enclosed bridge, will program the second rover with simulated time lag and view its movements via a two-way camera system. SLSC will organize and host a series of Innovation Workshops for K-8 students, each featuring teamwork-building engineering challenges from current and updated NASA-based science curricula. Participants will be recruited from SLSC community partners, which include community centers and faith-based programs for underserved families.
The Maryland Science Center (MSC) Astrobiology project includes an interactive exhibit and Davis Planetarium program for school and public museum visitors, exploring the search for life in our Solar System, the search for exoplanets and an understanding of extreme forms of Earthly life. Four day-long Educator Workshops have taken place during the project with a total of 179 teachers participating.
Baltimore’s MSC is the lead institution, with the project led by PI Van Reiner, MSC President and CEO and Co-PI Jim O’Leary, MSC Senior Scientist, and science advisors consisting of astronomers, biologists, a geologist and educators representing NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Space Telescope Science Institute, Carnegie Institute of Washington, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland and Maryland School for the Blind.
The project provides visitors with a sense of the Milky Way Galaxy’s size and composition, the galaxy’s number of stars and potential planets, and the number of other galaxies in the Universe. The exhibit explores Earthly extremophiles, what their survival signifies for life elsewhere in the Solar System, and examines possibilities for life on Mars and moons of the Solar System, explores techniques used to detect exoplanets and NASA’s missions searching for exoplanets and Earth-like worlds. The project looks to provide a sense of the vast number of potential planets that exist, the hardiness of Earthly life, the possibilities for life on nearby planets and moons, and the techniques used to search for exoplanets.
The exhibit and Planetarium program premiered November 2, 2012, and both remain as long-term Science Center offerings. Since opening, MSC has hosted nearly a million visitors, and with the Life Beyond Earth exhibit located in a highly trafficked area near the Davis Planetarium and Science On a Sphere, the great majority of visitors have experienced the exhibit. The We Are Aliens program in the Davis Planetarium has been seen by more than 26,000 visitors since opening.
The Mars Exploration Exhibit is a new public exhibition designed to provide experiential learning opportunities for students, educators and the public while inspiring greater excitement about space science. The exhibit emphasizes the importance of STEM education and careers through practical application and inquiry-based learning. Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of Johnson Space Center, is creating the new Mars landscape simulation in partnership with the Houston Independent School District and University of Houston Clear Lake. The exhibit will offer interactive science education activities that will be delivered through distance learning and onsite instruction at Space Center Houston. Utilizing research-based practices in both formal and informal learning environments, the project will help to attract and retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It will also foster life-long learning and enthusiasm toward the promise of space science and innovation. This unique exhibit will enable students and Space Center Houston’s more than 800,000 annual visitors to increase their knowledge of Earth science and apply their learning to the Mars environment. The exhibit will also highlight the role NASA missions serve in scientific innovation. The project will build the capacity of the Greater Houston community and school-based organizations to engage girls, minorities and other underrepresented students in STEM learning. It will offer in-depth science education for low-performing and gifted/talented students, ultimately bridging achievement gaps, increasing student performance and cultivating greater interest in science. Project outcomes will include: a 1,500-square-foot Mars landscape exhibition; interactive video presentations highlighting water recovery and other environmental processes; a standards-based learning curriculum aligned with Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS ) and National Science Standards; and a menu of K-12 experiential learning activities focused on water, air, renewable energy and other critical science topics.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Janet BrownMelanie JohnsonPaul SpanaMeg Naumann
A program that teaches middle-school Latinas to program their own computer games seeks ways of overcoming the growing shortfall of both Latinos and women in IT education and careers.
This article describes the Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP), an ongoing, intensive after school computer-mediated art technology program begun in 1996 by the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) in Tucson, Arizona. This five-semester program targets at-risk middle school youth from disadvantaged families. Students worked with professional artist/teachers, learning to do computer graphics and publishing, language arts and word processing, computer animation and video production.
Both scholarly literature and popular media often depict predominantly negative and one-dimensional images of boys, especially African-American boys. Predictions of these boys’ anticipated difficulties in school and adulthood are equally prevalent. This paper reports qualitative research that features case studies of nine urban boys of color, aged nine to eleven, who participated in an afterschool program where they learned to create digital multimedia texts. Drawing on an analysis of the children’s patterns of participation, their multimodal products, and their social and intellectual growth
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Glynda HullNora KenneyStacy MarpleAli Forsman-Schneider
A unique afterschool class in making comic strips and comic books, taught by a professional comic artist, encourages both literacy development and identity development in adolescent participants.
Interactive technologies are employed in museums to enhance the visitors' experience and help them learn in more authentic ways. Great amounts of time and money and many man-hours of hard work have been spent. But do such systems indeed achieve their goals? Do they contribute to a greater user experience (UX) and learning effectiveness? In this paper we describe the use of the "Walls of Nicosia" a 3D multi-touch table installed at the Leventis Municipal Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus. Two groups of students actively participated in this empirical study (they attended the 5th year class at
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Panagiotis ZahariasDespina MichaelYiorgos Chrysanthou