The project will refine, research and disseminate making exhibits and events that the museum has developed and tested to support early engineering skill development. The project will use cardboard, a familiar and flexible material, to support the activities. The goal is to develop insights and resources for informal educators across the museum field and beyond into how to effectively structure and facilitate open-ended maker education experiences for visitors that expand the number and kinds of museums and families who can engage in these activities. Maker education is often linked to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning and uses hands-on and collaborative approaches to support activities and projects that foster creativity, interest, and skill development. To address patterns of inequitable access to and participation in both formal and informal learning opportunities, the project will be designed to engage families from under-represented communities and research how they participate in informal engineering activities and environments. The project will make a suite of resources available for museums and other ISE practitioners that will be developed through iterative testing at all of the different settings. These resources will be made widely available via an open access online portal.
The project will research how effectively the use of cardboard making exhibits and events engage families, particularly families from underrepresented groups, in STEM and early engineering. The project's theoretical framework combines elements of: (1) learning sciences theories of family learning in museums; (2) making as a learning process; (3) early engineering practices and dispositions, and (4) equity in museums and the maker movement. The research will be conducted within two multi-month implementations of a large-scale Cardboard Engineering gallery at the Science Museum of Minnesota and two-week scaled implementations of the gallery at each of three recruited partner museum sites. The project design interweaves evaluation and research aims. Paired observations and surveys will be used to research how effectively the project is working in different venues. This integration of research and evaluation will generate a large data set from which to generalize about cardboard making across contexts. Case studies will be used to identify barriers to engagement that can be remedied, but they will provide a rich data set for understanding family learning and engineering in making. Research findings and products will be posted on the Center for Informal Science Education website and submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals such as Visitor Studies, ASTC Dimensions, the Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research and others.
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 the public impacts evaluation work conducted for the Explore Science: Earth & Space activity toolkits developed and created through the NASA-funded Space and Earth Informal STEM education (SEISE) project, this summative evaluation study of the toolkits was designed to address and answer questions regarding the number and range of audiences reached by the project, visitor engagement, relevance, science identity, and their understanding around NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) content areas (astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics, Earth science). The results are based on
This guide describes what took place during NYSCI’s Big Data for Little Kids workshop series, Museum Makers: Designing With Data. In addition to detailed outlines of the activities implemented during the program, this guide includes a glossary of recurrent terms and resources used throughout the workshops.
In 2017, as part of a National Science Foundation funded project, the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) set out to teach Big Data concepts to children ages 4 – 8 years old. NYSCI developed and piloted an after-school program for families to utilize the data cycle as a method of informed
Although discussions of museums often revolve around exhibits, educators in these spaces have the potential to create in-depth, social learning experiences beyond what is possible at exhibits alone. There is still little empirical research, however, to inform how we understand, approach, and improve museum facilitation practices. In this study, we sought to address this gap by quantifying the impact of facilitation by trained educators working with visitors at interactive museum exhibits and comparing this to visitor engagement and learning outcomes for families without educator support. Using
This poster was presented as part of the 2019 AISL PI Meeting. In this project, the New York Hall of Science, in collaboration with the Amazeum (Bentonville, AR), the Tech (San Jose, CA), and the Creativity Labs (Indiana University), is conducting a design-based research study to develop evidence-based guidance about how museums can use narratives to create more equitable and effective engineering experiences for girls. Through iterative activity development, the project team is exploring ways of using narrative elements (such as characters, settings, and problem frames) to communicate a story
This poster was created for the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program Primary Investigator (PI) meeting. The research presented here is a summary of the various informal STEM learning opportunities offered as part of the collaboration between university researchers and museum practionners. We were interested in how museums can advance parent-child engagment in STEM-rich tinkering and reflection. The participants were able to take part of a few different activities that allowed for informal reflection and tinkering at the Tinkering Lab, a musuem exhibit that invites families to take
The Signing Glossaries are six new apps researched and developed for families with at least one member who is deaf and hard of hearing. Each glossary provides access to thousands of signed terms and definitions encountered in visits to aquariums, botanical gardens, natural history museums, nature centers, science museums, and zoos.
Deaf and hard of hearing children typically have literacy levels that lag behind those of their hearing peers, making access to captions, labels, instructions, and information difficult. This, in combination with a lack of interpreters to sign material for them
This poster was presented at the 2019 NSF AISL Principal Investigators Meeting.
The project's goals were to:
Use a series of 6 museum-facilitated family workshops at pre-kindergarten (pre-k) centers to promote informal STEM learning.
Examine 3 conditions in which families and their children most benefit from “doing science and math” together.
Focus on populations that are typically underrepresented in STEM fields – families experiencing poverty and families who speak English and/or Spanish at home
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tricia ZuckerCheryl McCallumMichael AsselJanelle MontroyArmando OrdunaGisela Trevino
This is the summative evaluation for the My Sky Tonight: Early Childhood Pathways to Astronomy is a National Science Foundation funded Full-Scale Development project that was designed to support informal science education practitioner’s ability to provide astronomy learning for young children ages 3-5 years. Based on prior research and assessment of the field, the project team identified that many informal educators lack the astronomy content, interpretive strategies, and confidence they need to effectively engage audiences of families with preschool-aged children. Three mechanisms were
This study focused on narrative reflections families recorded shortly after they visited the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children’s Museum. They recorded their narrative reflections in a multi-media station called Story Hub. Some families brought the projects they had made in Tinkering Lab with them into Story Hub. We asked if families who had their project with them engaged in more STEM-related talk and associations to prior and future experiences than those who did not.
This study was designed to examine narratives that families recorded shortly after visiting the Tinkering Lab at the Chicago Children’s Museum. We view this work as intersecting with the event memory literature concerning variations in parental reminiscing styles for talking about past events (Fivush, Haden, Reese, 2006). The study also connects with efforts to assess learning in museum settings (Haden, Cohen, Uttal, & Marcus, 2016).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lauren PaganoDanielle NesiDestinee JohnsonDiana AcostaCatherine HadenDavid UttalPerla Gamez