The pilot and feasibility study will develop instructional workshops for an adult population of quilters to introduce them to computational thinking. By leveraging pre-existing social structures, skill sets, and engagement in quilting, the researchers hope to help participants develop computer science and computational thinking knowledge and skills.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Today’s young people have a personal stake in their ability to function with data. Future job prospects might hinge on their ability to participate in the new data economy. But equally, young people are themselves the subjects of data. The datafication of young people’s lives leads to profound questions about childhood, technology, and the equity of access to STEM learning around data, one of which is this: How might young people be empowered in a data-centric world?
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Leanne BowlerMark RosinIrene Lopatovska
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Collaborative robots – cobots – are designed to work with humans, not replace them. What learning affordances are created in educational games when learners program robots to assist them in a game instead of being the game? What game designs work best?
This project investigates long-term human-robot interaction outside of controlled laboratory settings to better understand how the introduction of robots and the development of socially-aware behaviors work to transform the spaces of everyday life, including how spaces are planned and managed, used, and experienced. Focusing on tour-guiding robots in two museums, the research will produce nuanced insights into the challenges and opportunities that arise as social robots are integrated into new spaces to better inform future design, planning, and decision-making. It brings together researchers from human geography, robotics, and art to think beyond disciplinary boundaries about the possible futures of human-robot co-existence, sociality, and collaboration. Broader impacts of the project will include increased accessibility and engagement at two partner museums, interdisciplinary research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students, a short video series about the current state of robotic technology to be offered as a free educational resource, and public art exhibitions reflecting on human-robot interactions. This project will be of interest to scholars of Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography as well as museum administrators, educators and the general public.
This interdisciplinary project brings together Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography to explore the production of social space through emerging forms of HRI. The project broadly asks: How does the deployment of social robots influence the production of social space—including the functions, meanings, practices, and experiences of particular spaces? The project is based on long-term ethnographic observation of the development and deployment of tour-guiding robots in an art museum and an earth science museum. A social roboticist will develop a socially-aware navigation system to add nuance to the robots’ socio-spatial behavior. A digital artist will produce digital representations of the interactions that take place in the museum, using the robot’s own sensor data and other forms of motion capture. A human geographer will conduct interviews with museum visitors and staff as well as ethnographic observation of the tour-guiding robots and of the roboticists as they develop the navigation system. They will produce an ethnographic analysis of the robots’ roles in the organization of the museums, everyday practices of museum staff and visitors, and the differential experiences of the museum space. The intellectual merits of the project consist of contributions at the intersections of STS, robotics, and human geography examining the value of ethnographic research for HRI, the development of socially-aware navigation systems, the value of a socio-spatial analytic for understanding emerging forms of robotics, and the role of robots within evolving digital geographies.
This project is jointly funded by the Science and Technology Studies program in SBE and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program in EHR.
The AI behind Virtual Humans Exhibit aims to communicate to the public about the capabilities and impact of artificial intelligence (AI) through AI technologies used in Virtual Humans including facial recognition and natural language processing. AI has and will continue to profoundly impact society in the United States and around the globe. It is important to prepare the nation’s youth and the future workforce with fundamental knowledge of AI. Informal settings, such as museums, offer open and flexible opportunities in helping youth and the general public learn about AI. Virtual Humans provide an ideal vehicle to illustrate many fields of AI, as AI is arguably the science of building intelligence that thinks and acts like humans. Led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in AI, learning design, and assessment from the Institute for Creative Technologies at University of Southern California and the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley, this project will develop a Virtual Human exhibit to engage visitors through structured conversations with a Virtual Human, while showcasing how AI drives the Virtual Human’s behavior behind the scenes. The exhibit will include collaborative learning experiences for visitors such as parent-child, siblings and peers to explore what AI is and is not, what AI is and is not capable of, and what impact it will have on their lives.
The project will investigate three research questions: (1) How can a museum exhibit be designed to engage visitor dyads in collaborative learning about AI? (2) How can complex AI concepts underlying the Virtual Human be communicated in a way that is understandable by the general public? And (3) How does and to what extent the Virtual Human exhibit increase knowledge and reduce misconceptions about AI?
The project leverages existing conversational Virtual Human technology developed through decades of collaborative research in AI, including machine vision, natural language processing, automated reasoning, character animation, and machine learning. Set in the informal setting of a museum, the exhibit will be designed following evidence-based research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. The project team will use a mixed methods design, drawing on design-based research methodologies and experimental studies. The research team will conduct analysis of visitor observations and interviews for iterative formative improvement. Randomized experimental studies will be conducted in both lab and naturalistic environments to gauge visitor knowledge about AI. Quasi-experimental analyses will be performed to study the relationship between engagement with exhibit features and AI knowledge. The project will produce an interactive exhibit with a Virtual Human installed at the Lawrence Hall of Science and other participating museums, and instruments to measure AI learning. The project will also produce a website where visitors can experience parts of the exhibit online and continue more in-depth learning about AI and the Virtual Human technology. The project holds the potential for producing theoretical and practical advances in helping the general public develop an understanding of AI capability and ethics, advancing knowledge in the process through which young learners develop knowledge about AI, and formulating design principles for creating collaborative learning experiences in informal settings. The results will be disseminated through conference presentations, scholarly publications, and social media. The Virtual Human exhibit will be designed for dissemination and made available for installations at informal science education communities.
Virtual Reality (VR) shows promise to broaden participation in STEM by engaging learners in authentic but otherwise inaccessible learning experiences. The immersion in authentic learner environments, along with social presence and learner agency, that is enabled by VR helps form memorable learning experiences. VR is emerging as a promising tool for children with autism. While there is wide variation in the way people with autism present, one common set of needs associated with autism that can be addressed with VR is sensory processing. This project will research and model how VR can be used to minimize barriers for learners with autism, while also incorporating complementary universal designs for learning (UDL) principles to promote broad participation in STEM learning. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings. This project will build on a prototype VR simulation, Mission to Europa Prime, that transports learners to a space station for exploration on Jupiter's moon Europa, a strong candidate for future discovery of extraterrestrial life and a location no human can currently experience in person. The prototype simulation will be expanded to create a full, immersive STEM-based experience that will enable learners who often encounter cognitive, social, and emotional barriers to STEM learning in public spaces, particularly learners with autism, to fully engage and benefit from this STEM-learning experience. The simulation will include a variety of STEM-learning puzzles, addressing science, mathematics, engineering, and computational thinking through authentic and interesting problem-solving tasks. The project team's learning designers and researchers will co-design puzzles and user interfaces with students at a post-secondary institute for learners with autism and other learning differences. The full VR STEM-learning simulation will be broadly disseminated to museums and other informal education programs, and distributed to other communities.
Project research is designed to advance knowledge about VR-based informal STEM learning and the affordances of VR to support learners with autism. To broaden STEM participation for all, the project brings together research at the intersection of STEM learning, cognitive and educational neuroscience, and the human-technology frontier. The simulation will be designed to provide agency for learners to adjust a STEM-learning VR experience for their unique sensory processing, attention, and social anxiety needs. The project will use a participatory design process will ensure the VR experience is designed to reduce barriers that currently exclude learners with autism and related conditions from many informal learning opportunities, broadening participation in informal STEM learning. Design research, usability, and efficacy studies will be conducted with teens and adults at the Pacific Science Center and Boston Museum of Science, which serve audiences with autism, along with the general public. Project research is grounded in prior NSF-funded research and leverages the team's expertise in STEM learning simulations, VR development, cognitive psychology, universal design, and informal science education, as well as the vital expertise of the end-user target audience, learners with autism. In addition to being shared at conferences, the research findings will be submitted for publication to peer-reviewed journals for researchers and to appropriate publications for VR developers and disseminators, museum programs, neurodiverse communities and other potentially interested parties.
This Innovations in Development award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Teon EdwardsJodi Asbell-ClarkeJamie LarsenIbrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki
Increasingly, scientists and their institutions are engaging with lay audiences via media. The emergence of social media has allowed scientists to engage with publics in novel ways. Social networking sites have fundamentally changed the modern media environment and, subsequently, media consumption habits. When asked where they primarily go to learn more about scientific issues, more than half of Americans point to the Internet. These online spaces offer many opportunities for scientists to play active roles in communicating and engaging directly with various publics. Additionally, the proposed research activities were inspired by a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that included a challenge to science communication researchers to determine better approaches for communicating science through social media platforms. Humor has been recommended as a method that scientists could use in communicating with publics; however, there is little empirical evidence that its use is effective. The researchers will explore the effectiveness of using humor for communicating about artificial intelligence, climate science and microbiomes.
The research questions are: How do lay audiences respond to messages about scientific issues on social media that use humor? What are scientists' views toward using humor in constructing social media messages? Can collaborations between science communication scholars and practitioners facilitate more effective practices? The research is grounded in the theory of planned behavior and framing as a theory of media effects. A public survey will collect and analyze data on Twitter messages with and without humor, the number of likes and re-tweets of each message, and their scientific content. Survey participants will be randomly assigned to one of twenty-four experimental conditions. The survey sample, matching recent U.S. Census Bureau data, will be obtained from opt-in panels provided by Qualtrics, an online market research company. The second component of the research will quantify the attitudes of scientists toward using humor to communicate with publics on social media. Data will be collected from a random sample of scientists and graduate students at R1 universities nationwide. Data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression modeling.
The broader impacts of this project are twofold: findings from the research will be shared with science communication scholars and trainers advancing knowledge and practice; and an infographic (visual representation of findings) will be distributed to practitioners who participate in research-practice partnerships. It will provide a set of easily-referenced, evidence-based guidelines about the types of humor to which audiences respond positively on social media.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sara YeoLeona Yi-Fan SuMichael Cacciatore
Robots and robotics excite and challenge youths and adults. Unfortunately, the cost of purchasing robots or building useful robots is prohibitive for many low resource individuals and groups. This project will relieve this expense and provide an opportunity for resource limited individuals to experience the thrilling aspects of robotics by building a computer game that simulates robotic action. This project uses co-robotics wherein the participating player programs an avatar to assist in a symbiotic manner to achieve the goals of the game and participant. The game will provide access to the ideas and concepts such as programing, computational thinking and role assumption. The overarching goals are (1) to engage low-resource learners in STEM education through robotics in out-of-school spaces, and (2) to update the field of robotics-base STEM education to integrate the co-robotics paradigm.
This project is designed to gain knowledge on how co-robotics can be used in the informal education sector to facilitate the integration of computational science with STEM topics and to expand the educational use of co-robotics. Because the concept of co-robotics is new, a designed-based research approach will be used to build theoretical knowledge and knowledge of effective interventions for helping participants learn programing and computational thinking. Data will be collected from several sources including surveys, self-reports, in game surveys, pre and post-tests. These data collection efforts will address the following areas: Technology reliability, Resolution of cognitive tension around co-play, Accelerate discovery and initial engagement, Foster role-taking and interdependence with co-robots, Investigate social learning, and Validate measures using item response theory analysis. The DBR study questions are:
1.What design principles support the development of P3Gs that can effectively attract initial engagement in a free-choice OST space that offers large numbers of competing options? 2.What design principles support a P3G gameplay loop that enables learning of complex skills, computational thinking and co-robotics norms, and building of individual and career interest over the course of repeated engagement?
3.What design principles support P3Gs in attaining a high rate of re-engagement within low-resource OST settings? 4.What kinds of positive impact can P3Gs have on their proximal and distal environment? In addition, the project will research these questions about design: 1.What technical and game design features are needed to accommodate technological interruption? 2.What design elements or principles mitigate competition for cognitive resources between real-time play and understanding the co-robotic's behavior in relation to the code the player wrote for it? 3.What design elements are effective at getting learners in OST settings to notice and start playing the game? 4.What designs are effective at encouraging learners to engage with challenging content, particularly the transition from manual play to co-play? 5.What design elements help players develop a stake in the role the game offers? 6.What social behaviors emerge organically around a P3G prototype that is not designed to evoke specific social interactions?
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. This AISL project investigates how informal programs can broaden participation by building social capital in STEM for youth from underrepresented groups. The project integrates social network analysis with research on informal learning, and draws on a framework to connect learning across a variety of sectors. It builds on evidence that sponsorship of youth interest, affinity-based mentorship, and brokering connections to other settings and opportunities can build social capital and support interest and persistence in STEM. It represents a strategic and timely investment into research that solidifies these emerging insights from research and practice, conducting focused investigation into relational supports for STEM interests that are particularly well suited to informal programs.
The project is guided by two research questions: (1) What forms of social capital are tied to persistence in and connecting across informal STEM programs for youth from underrepresented groups? (2) What program features--specifically sponsorship, mentorship, and brokering--grow these social supports for persistence in and connecting across informal STEM programs for underserved youth? These questions are addressed through a mixed methods 18-month cross-sectional study of 200 students in three informal programs in Orange County, California that offer project-based engineering and coding programs, support mentorship, and focus on groups underrepresented in STEM. The sample will include three age categories, capturing the transition to high school, persistence during high school, and transition to college and career. Teens will be interviewed three times at 6-month intervals, spanning these transitions. The goal of this research and effort is to determine if social capital plays an extra ordinary role in learning by this group.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Cities and communities in the U.S. and around the world are entering a new era of transformational change, in which their inhabitants and the surrounding built and natural environments are increasingly connected by smart technologies, leading to new opportunities for innovation, improved services, and enhanced quality of life. The Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) program supports strongly interdisciplinary, integrative research and research capacity-building activities that will improve understanding of smart and connected communities and lead to discoveries that enable sustainable change to enhance community functioning. This project is a Research Coordination Network (RCN) that focuses on achieving SCC for medium/small size, remote, and rural communities through a polycentric (multiple centers) integrated policy, design, and technology approach. The communities served by the RCN have higher barriers to information, resources, and services than larger urban communities. To reduce this gap, the PIs propose to develop need-based R&D pipelines to select solutions with the highest potential impacts to the communities. Instead of trying to connect under-connected communities to nearby large cities, this proposal aims to develop economic opportunities within the communities themselves. This topic aligns well with the vision of the SCC program, and the proposed RCN consists of a diverse group of researchers, communities, industry, government, and non-profit partners.
This award will support the development of an RCN within the Commonwealth of Virginia which will coordinate multiple partners in developing innovations utilizing smart and connected technologies. The goal of the research coordination network is to enable researchers and citizens to collaborate on research supporting enhanced quality of life for medium, small, and rural communities which frequently lack the communication and other infrastructure available in cities. The research coordination network will be led by the University of Virginia. There are 14 partner organizations including six research center partners in transportation, environment, architecture and urban planning, and engineering and technology; two State and Industry partners (Virginia Municipal League and Virginia Center for Innovative Technology); four community partners representing health services (UVA Center for Telemedicine), small and remote communities (Weldon Cooper Center), neighborhood communities (Charlottesville Neighborhood Development), and urban communities (Thriving Cities); and two national partners which support high speed networking (US-Ignite) and city-university hubs (MetroLab). Examples of research coordination include telemedicine services, transportation services, and user-centric and community-centric utilization and deployment of sensor technologies.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ila BermanT. Donna ChenKaren RheubanQian Cai
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. This Research in Service to Practice project will address the issues around Informal Education of rural middle school students who have high potential regarding academic success in efforts to promote computer and IT knowledge, advanced quantitative knowledge, and STEM skills. Ten school districts in rural Iowa will be chosen for this study. It is anticipated that new knowledge on rural informal education will be generated to benefit the Nation's workforce. The specific objectives are to understand how informal STEM learning shapes the academic and psychosocial outcomes of rural, high-potential students, and to identify key characteristics of successful informal STEM learning environments for rural, high-potential students and their teachers. The results of this project will provide new tools for educators to increase the flow of underserved students into STEM from economically-disadvantaged rural settings.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicts a rapid rise in the number of STEM jobs available in the next decade, describing an urgent need for students' educational opportunities to prepare them for this workforce. In 2014, 62% of CEOs of major US corporations reported challenges filling positions requiring advanced computer and information technology knowledge. The project team will use a mixed methods approach, integrating comparative case study and mixed effects longitudinal methods, to study the Excellence program. Data sources include teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student assessments of academic aptitude and psychosocial outcomes. The analysis and evaluation of the program will be grounded in understanding the local efforts of school districts to build curriculum responsive to the demands of their high-potential student body. The project design, and subsequent analysis plan, utilizes a mixed methods approach, incorporating case study and longitudinal quantitative methods to analyze naturalistic data and build robust evidence for the implementation and impact of this program. This project will provide significant insights in how best to design, implement, and support informal out-of-school learning environments to broaden participation in the highest levels of STEM education and careers for under-resourced rural students.