Data science is ever-present in modern life. The need to learn with and about data science is becoming increasingly important in a world where the quantity of data is constantly growing, where one’s own data are often being harvested and marketed, where data science career opportunities are rapidly increasing, and where understanding statistics, data sources, and data representation is integral to understanding STEM and the world around us. Museums have the opportunity to play a critical role in introducing the public to data science concepts in ways that center personal relevance, social connections and collaborative learning. However, data science and statistics are difficult concepts to distill and provide meaningful engagement with during the brief learning experiences typical to science museums. This Pilot and Feasibility study brings together data scientists, data science educators, and museum exhibit designers to consider these questions:
What are the important data science concepts for the public to explore and understand in museum exhibits?
How can museum exhibits be designed to support visitors with diverse backgrounds and experiences to engage with these data science concepts?
What principles can shape these designs to promote broadening participation in data science specifically and STEM more broadly?
This Pilot and Feasibility project combines multidisciplinary expert convening, feasibility testing, and early exploratory prototyping around the focal topic of data science exhibits. Project partners, TERC, the Museum of Science, Boston, and The Tech Interactive in San Jose will engage in an iterative process to develop a theoretical grounding and practical guidance for museum practitioners. The project will include two convenings, bringing together teams of experts from the fields of data science, data science education and museum exhibit design. Prior to the first convening, an initial literature summary and a survey of convening participants will be conducted, culminating in a preliminary list of big ideas about data science. Periodically, participants will have the opportunity to rank, annotate and expand this list, as a form of ongoing data collection. During the convenings, participants will explore the preliminary list, share related work from the three disciplines, engage with related data science activities in small groups, and work together to build consensus around promising data science topics and approaches for exhibits. Participant evaluation will allow for iterative improvement of the convenings and the capture of missed points or overlooked topics. After each convening, museum partners will create prototypes that respond to the convening conversations. Prototypes will be pilot tested (evaluated) with an intentionally recruited group of families that includes both frequent visitors and those who are less likely to visit the museum; diversity in terms of race, languages and dis/ability will be reflected in selection. Pilot data collection will consist of structured observations and interviews. Results from the first round of prototyping will be shared with convening participants as a way to modify the list of big ideas and to further interrogate the feasibility of communicating these ideas in an exhibit format. Results from the convenings and from both rounds of prototyping will be combined in a guiding document that will be shared on all three partner websites, and more broadly with the informal STEM learning field. The team will also host a workshop for practitioners interested in designing data science exhibits, and present at a conference focused on museum exhibits and their design.
The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) will convene a two-day participatory design conference of to identify research and education opportunities in informal settings for supporting literacy concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially for diverse and underserved youth whose communities are impacted by the bias in some AI processes. AI uses computer systems that simulate human intelligence. AI systems impact nearly every aspect of daily living, performing tasks underlying navigation apps, facial recognition, e-payments, and social media. AI can perpetuate inequities and biased outcomes in the culture at large. The conference will explore how to promote engagement and conceptual learning among youth about how AI works and what skills are needed to critically use and apply AI. The conference will also explore ways to support the interests of diverse and underserved children and youth in shaping AI and joining the growing STEM workforce that will use AI in their professions.
The conference will identify key features and needs with respect to AI literacy and explore the specific roles that informal learning can play in advancing AI literacy for youth in diverse and underserved communities. Participants in the conference will include designers, learning scientists, researchers, informal and formal educators, and science center professionals. Attendees will work in separate teams and as a group to explore and critique existing AI tools and learning frameworks, discuss lessons learned from promising AI literacy programs, and identify design principles and future directions for research. Specific attention will be paid to informal mechanisms of engagement, promising networks, and research-practice partnerships that take advantage of the unique affordances of informal learning and community services to accelerate AI literacy for historically excluded youth. The insights gained from this work will result in a set of research and programmatic priorities for informal institutions to promote AI literacy in culturally responsive ways. The resulting published guide and community events will broadly disseminate priorities and design principles generated by this convening to help informal learning institutions and community learning organizations identify both assets and priorities for addressing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion issues related to AI literacy.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. This project is a two-day conference, along with pre- and post-conference activities, with the goal of furthering the informal science learning field's review of the research and development that has been conducted on data visualizations that have been used to help the public better understand and become more engaged in science. The project will address an urgent need in informal science education, providing a critical first step towards a synthesis of research and technology development in visualization and, thus, to inform and accelerate work in the field in this significant and rapidly changing domain.
The project will start with a Delphi study by the project evaluator prior to the conference to provide an Emerging Field Assessment on data visualization work to date. Then, a two-day conference at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and related activities will bring together AISL-funded PIs, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, designers, and technology developers to (a) synthesize work to date, (b) bring in relevant research from fields outside of informal learning, and (c) identify remaining knowledge gaps for further research and development. The project team will also develop a website with videos of all presentations, conference documentation, resources, and links to social media communities; and a post-conference publication mapping the state of the field, key findings, and promising technologies.
The initiative also has a goal to broaden participation, as the attendees will include a diverse cadre of professionals in the field who contribute to data visualization work.
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.
Celebrating 15 years of success and growth, the STS Conference Graz on May 9 and 10, 2016, gathered nearly 200 delegates from all over the world who had the opportunity to discuss and share research and experiences on 6 main themes: Policy and Technology; Gender and Queer STS; Mobility, Energy and Sustainability; Responsible Research and Innovation Studies; Nutrition, Health and Biomedicine; and Information and Communication Technologies, Surveillance and Society.
The EU-funded MultiMatch project aims to overcome language barriers, and media and distribution problems currently affecting access to on-line cultural heritage material. Partners are developing a vertical search engine able to harvest heterogeneous information from distributed sources and present it in a synthesized manner. To design such a system, user requirements were initially gathered and then translated into specific design features to ensure that the search engine developed was consistent with user needs. This paper presents these user requirements, the initial design of the MultiMatch
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jennifer MarlowPaul CloughNeil IresonJuan Manuel Cigarran RecueroJavier ArtilesFranca Debole
In the provision of networked services for museums, the term 'openness' crops up in a variety of contexts including open standards and open source software. In addition, the Web 2.0 environment has led to increased interest in open content and in the use of freely available networked applications which may be regarded as open services. This focus on openness for the developer or service provider can be complemented with a culture of openness which encourages the users to actively engage with services and generate their own content. It can be difficult to argue against the benefits which
To explore how the United States can harness the powerful features of digital games for learning, the Federation of American Scientists, the Entertainment Software Association, and the National Science Foundation convened a National Summit on Educational Games, on October 25, 2005 in Washington, DC. The Summit brought together nearly 100 experts to discuss ways to accelerate the development, commercialization, and deployment of new generation games for learning.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Federation of American ScientistsHenry Kelly
Realizing the power of CyberLearning to transform education will require vision, strategy, and an engaged, talented community. Activities are needed to energize the community, refine and sharpen the path forward, and provide a more active and ongoing forum for clarifying the big ideas and challenging questions. In response to this need, SRI International, together with the Lawrence Hall of Science and with key support from the National Geographic Society, will organize a set of activities to advance a shared vision of the future of learning, encompassing the systems, people, and technology dimensions mutually necessary for any scalable and lasting advances in education. The innovative format for these activities is inspired by the TED talks, Wikipedia, and social networking. As in TED, a small set of leading researchers will be selected to give very short, very high quality, stimulating talks. These CyberLearning Talks will be featured at a 1-day summit meeting in Washington, DC, streamed so that local cyberlearning research communities may participate at a distance, and posted on a website. As in Wikipedia, CyberLearning Pages will be created, each page featuring a synopsis of a big idea in CyberLearning and the relevant research challenges. The 1-day conference will be followed by a small 1-day workshop focusing on how to evaluate cyberlearning efforts, identify progress, and identify important new directions. Finally, to disseminate and stimulate conversation about both the video talks and Wikipedia entries, a presence for the community will be created on social networking sites. The target outcomes of the effort will be (i) a cyberlearning research community with participants from across the many current constituent communities, and fostered awareness and appreciation of the broad range of expertise and interests across that wider community; (ii) foundations for sustained discussion of big ideas, insights, and challenges to help this new community define a more engaged, crisper vision of its own future, (iii) a community resource that can become a site for interconnecting stakeholders in the CyberLearning community and supporting investigators in improving field-generated proposals, and (iv) an emerging sense of direction for CyberLearning among a wider audience of leaders. Such community building and awareness is expected to foster collaborations that will lead to innovative and research-grounded ways of using technology to transform education -- formal and informal and across a lifetime.
For document visualization, folding techniques provide a focus-plus-context approach with fairly high legibility on flat sections. To enable richer interaction, we explore the design space of multi-touch document folding. We discuss several design considerations for simple modeless gesturing and compatibility with standard Drag and Pinch gestures. We categorize gesture models along the characteristics of Symmetric/Asymmetric and Serial/Parallel, which yields three gesture models. We built a prototype document workspace application that integrates folding and standard gestures, and a system for
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Patrick ChiuChunyuan LiaoFrancine Chen
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
These reports were delivered on day three at the conclusion of the Citizen Science Toolkit Conference at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York on June 20-23, 2007. The reports summarize the discussions that took place in five separate breakout groups, which met periodically throughout the conference to focus on key Citizen Science themes and topics that emerged during conference presentations and plenary discussions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cornell Lab of OrnithologyCatherine McEverNolan DoeskenGeoff LeBaronSarah KirnRebecca JordanMaureen McConnell
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This discussion was held during the final plenary session on day three of the Citizen Science Toolkit Conference at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York on June 20-23, 2007. Topics discussed include citizen science as a new field or discipline, the science role that citizen scientists play, next steps, issues to consider, suggestions, and developing (or not) a shared data infrastructure.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cathy McEverCornell Lab of Ornithology
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting a three-day symposium to consider how to use images to communicate science and technology most effectively. Participants will include scientists, imaging technologists, computer scientists, photographers, science writers, illustrators, computer modelers, mathematicians, and others involved with communicating the basic science and findings from research. The focus of the conference will be on communication -- both from the scientific community to the general public, and within the scientific community. The 300 conference attendees will hear presentations from professionals working in the area. However, they will spend the majority of the time working collaboratively on solutions to model problems such as how to represent the interaction of a receptor with a ligand, how to make visually explicit the passage of time at all scales, and how to explain visually a sequence of events. Those who have committed to attend the conference will participate for several months in a conference web site prior to and after the meeting. The web site will enable participants to "critique" and make modification to various images and text used to communicate science. It also will be used to enable participants to collaborate in working groups on the model problems. The PI's for the project are Boyce Rensberger and Felice Frankel. Rensberger is director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at MIT. He is a science writer and editor and has worked in these capacities for both the New York Times and The Washington Post. Frankel is Artist-in-Resident and research scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She photographs and digitally images research data in science and engineering. She has collaborated with George Whitesides to publish "On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science."