This document is the final evaluation report for the project, which focuses both on formative evaluation of the collaborative+interdisciplinary presentation creation process and summative evaluation of audience learning outcomes.
This project will use a complex systems approach to hazard reduction across multiple scales of risk by developing a new generation of socio-technical digital twin that integrates models of physical infrastructure systems and virtual networks of communication with social games to engage community awareness and commitment to collective action.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kenichi SogaLouise ComfortStephen CollierMichael GollnerJ. Keith Gilless
Data is increasingly important in all aspects of people’s lives, from the day-to-day, to careers and to civic engagement. Preparing youth to use data to answer questions and solve problems empowers them to participate in society as informed citizens and opens doors to 21st century career opportunities. Ensuring equitable representation in data literacy and data science careers is critical. For many girls underrepresented in STEM, developing a "data science identity" requires personally meaningful experiences working with data. This project aims to promote middle school-aged girls’ interest and aspirations in data science through an identity-aligned, social game-based learning approach. The goals are to create a more diverse and inclusive generation of data scientists who see data as a resource and who are equipped with the skills and dispositions necessary to work with data in order to solve practical problems. The research team will run 10 social clubs and 10 data science clubs mentored by women in data science recruited through the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Participants will be 250 middle school-aged girls recruited in Miami, FL, and Yolo County, CA, through local and national girls’ organizations. Youth will participate in a data science club and will learn key data science concepts and skills, including data structures, storage, exploration, analysis, and visualization. These concepts will be learned from working with their own data collected in personally meaningful ways in addition to working with data collected by others in the same social game eco-system. The project will also develop facilitator materials to allow adult volunteers to create game-based informal data science learning experiences for youth in their areas. The project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments and is co-funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), which seeks to engage underrepresented students in technology-rich learning environments, including skills in data literacy, and increase students’ knowledge and interest in information and communication technology (ICT) careers.
Researchers will focus on two primary research questions: 1) Across gameplay and club experiences, in what ways do participants engage with data to pursue personal or social goals? 2) How do gameplay and club experiences shape girls’ perceptions of data, data science, and their fit with data and data science? The project will use design-based research methods to iteratively design the game and social club experiences. To ensure that uses of data feel personally and socially meaningful to young girls, the virtual world’s goals, narratives, and activities will be co-designed with girls from groups underrepresented in data science. The project will research engagement with game data in two informal, game-based learning scenarios: organic, self-directed, social play club, and structured, adult-facilitated data science clubs. The research will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods including surveys, focus groups, interviews, and gameplay and club observations. Project evaluation will determine how gameplay and club experiences impact participants' attitudes toward and interest in data-rich futures. The project holds the potential for broadening participation and promoting interest in data science by blending game-based learning with the rich social and adult mentoring through club participation. The results will be disseminated through conference presentations, scholarly publications, and social media. The game and facilitator materials will be designed for dissemination and made freely available to the public.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lisa HardyGary GoldbergerJennifer Kahn
Access to STEM information is unequal, with rural and poor communities often receiving the fewest public education science and science literacy opportunities. Rural areas also face unique STEM teaching and technology integration challenges. In fact, LatinX communities in rural areas are less likely to have access to educational resources and language supports available to LatinX communities in urban centers. This project will help address these inequities by engaging rural librarians, bilingual science communicators, polar scientists, and a technical team to create a series of five bilingual virtual reality (VR) experiences to enhance STEM understanding and appreciation. Project researchers will create a new channel for disseminating polar science, working first with rural Latinx communities in Wisconsin to create a new network between rural communities and university researchers. Involving rural librarians in the co-design of instruction process will produce new ways for rural libraries to engage their local communities and their growing Latinx populations with polar science learning experiences. Each of the five VR experiences will focus on a different area of research, using the captivating Arctic and Antarctic environments as a central theme to convey science. VR is a particularly powerful and apt approach, making it possible to visit places that most cannot experience first-hand while also learning about the wide range of significant research taking place in polar regions. After design, prototyping and testing are finished, the VR experiences will be freely available for use nationally in both rural and urban settings. Public engagement with science creates a multitude of mutual benefits that result from a better-informed society. These benefits include greater trust and more reasoned scrutiny of science along with increased interest in STEM careers, many of which have higher earning potential. The project team will partner with 51 rural libraries which are valued community outlets valuable outlets to improve science literacy and public engagement with science. The effects of this project will be seen with thousands of community members who take part in the testing of prototype VR experiences during development and scaled engagement through ongoing library programs utilizing the final VR experiences for years to come.
This project will create new informal STEM learning assessment techniques through combining prior efforts in the areas of educational data mining for stealth assessment and viewpoint similarity metrics through monitoring gaze direction. Results of the project contribute to the field of educational data mining (EDM), focusing on adopting its methods for VR learning experiences. EDM is a process of using fine grained interaction data from a digital system to support educationally relevant conclusions and has been applied extensively to intelligent tutors and more recently, educational videogames. This project will continue building on existing approaches by expanding to include the unique affordances of VR learning media, specifically gaze. The project will focus on predicting user quitting as well as assessing key learning goals within each experience and triangulate these predictive models with user observations and post-experience surveys. The eventual application of this foundational research would address the problem in assessing a learner using measures external to the experience itself (i.e., surveys) and instead provide new methods that instrument learners using only data generated by their actions within the learning context. These techniques will provide a new means for evaluating informal learning in immersive technology settings without need for explicit tagging. The findings from this project will enable a greater understanding of the relationship between a user’s experience and their learning outcomes, which may prove integral in the creation of educational interventions using VR technology.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments. This project is also supported by the Office of Polar Programs.
From a strategic communication perspective, for any communication to be effective, it must be audience-centered, with content and delivery channels that are relevant to its intended target. When trying to reach culturally specific communities or other groups that are not otherwise connected with science research, it is crucial to partner with community members to co-create content through media that is appealing and culturally competent. This commentary considers some examples including storytelling through ‘fotonovelas’ and radio stories, community drama and serious games.
Science Hunters is an outreach project which employs the computer game Minecraft to engage children with scientific learning and research through school visits, events, and extracurricular clubs. We principally target children who may experience barriers to accessing Higher Education, including low socioeconomic status, being the first in their family to attend university, and disability (including Special Educational Needs). The Minecraft platform encourages teamwork and makes science learning accessible and entertaining for children, irrespective of background. We employ a flexible approach
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Laura HobbsCarly StevensJackie HartleyCalum Hartley
The goal of this project is to promote informal STEM education in polar research through a novel interactive learning display that uses virtual and augmented reality technology. A new display system will be developed that combines the successful techniques of touch-enabled tabletop displays with new low-cost, head-mounted display technology to deliver an immersive 3D learning experience for the IceCube Neutrino Detection system located at the South Pole. The system will provide new means for engaging the public in learning about the IceCube Neutrino Dectection system and the challenges of Antarctic research.
The proposal relies on collaboration between three groups on the University of Wisconsin- Madison campus, including the Living Environments Laboratory (LEL), the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), and the Games Learning Society (GLS). Once developed, the display system will be installed at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery Town Center, a public space that attracts close to 50,000 people per year. This proposal was submitted as an Exploratory Pathways proposal, meaning that it represents a chance to establish the basis for future research, design, and development of innovations or approaches. Outcomes from this project will inform the PIs of how best to extend the system to add more 3D environments for other research locations in Antarctica. The system will be implemented in an extensible fashion so that a user can select from one of several Antarctic research station locations, not just IceCube, from the main menu of the system and suddenly be immersed in a 3D world that seeks to teach users about polar research at that location. Contents of the interactive learning display will be translated into Spanish, and users will be able to choose which language they want to use. Evaluations of the system will also inform designers about how these museum-type systems impact learning outcomes for the general public.
This project was submitted to the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, but will be funded by the Division of Polar Programs. AISL 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.
We developed a multi-touch interface for the citizen science video game Foldit, in which players manipulate 3D protein structures, and compared multi-touch and mouse interfaces in a 41-subject user study. We found that participants performed similarly in both interfaces and did not have an overall preference for either interface. However, results indicate that for tasks involving guided movement to dock protein parts, subjects using the multi-touch interface completed tasks more accurately with fewer moves, and reported higher attention and spatial presence. For tasks involving direct
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Thomas MuenderSadaab Ali GulaniLauren WestendorfClarissa VerishRainer MalakaOrit ShaerSeth Cooper
We explored the potential of science to facilitate social inclusion with teenagers who had interrupted their studies before the terms set for compulsory education. The project was carried out from 2014 to 2018 within SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies), a scientific and higher education institution in physics, mathematics and neurosciences, and was focused on the production of video games using Scratch. The outcomes are encouraging: through active engagement, the participants have succeeded in completing complex projects, taking responsibilities and interacting with people
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Simona CerratoFrancesca RizzatoLucia TealdiElena Canel
The Year in ISE is a slidedoc designed to track and characterize field growth, change and impact, important publications, and current topics in ISE in 2018. Use it to inform new strategies, find potential collaborators for your projects, and support proposal development. Scope This slidedoc highlights a selection of developments and resources in 2018 that were notable and potentially useful for the informal STEM education field. It is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, nor to provide endorsement. To manage the scope and length, we have focused on meta analyses, consensus reports