The night skies and the planet on which we live can be inspirational to young and old alike. In the run up to its 200th anniversary in 2020, the U.K.'s Royal Astronomical Society has put together a £1 million scheme to fund outreach and engagement activities for groups that are less well served in terms of access to astronomy and geophysics. This article outlines the projects funded and the impact they are starting to have.
During the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, we initiated a collaboration between astrophysicists in Western Australia working toward building the largest telescope on Earth, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), and Indigenous artists living in the region where the SKA is to be built. We came together to explore deep traditions in Indigenous culture, including perspectives of the night sky, and the modern astrophysical understanding of the Universe. Over the course of the year, we travelled as a group and camped at the SKA site, we sat under the stars and shared stories about the
This study addresses the increasing interest in family learning in informal settings by investigating strategies to better engage families in science talk and practices. As part of a larger design-based research study, we examine how scientists and parents use think-pair-share discussion prompts to support families’ understandings about local community water sources and facilitate experimentation with a surface and underground water model. Grounded in sociocultural theory of learning, we focus on parent-child interactions and family sensemaking. We analyzed four water quality workshops with 44
World’s Fairs and scientific-technological theme parks have been propitious places for the communication of science and technology through modernity. This work addresses the issue of the construction of public discourse about the future within these sites, as well as the changing role attributed to science and technology as mediators in the relationships between nature and society. In both fairs and parks, science and technology play a leading role in the construction of the discourse about the desirable and achievable future. The practices of science communication and technology have specific
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Susana Herrera-LimaDaniela Martin Segura
“Science crowdfunding” is a research funding system in which members of the public make small financial contributions towards a research project via the Internet. We compared the more common research process involving public research funding with science crowdfunding. In the former, academic-peer communities review the research carried out whereas the Crowd Community, an aggregation of backers, carries out this function in the latter. In this paper, we propose that science crowdfunding can be successfully used to generate “crowd-supported science” by means of this Crowd Community.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Yuko IkkataiEuan McKayHiromi Yokoyama
For decades the idea that scientists, policy makers and industry know best in research and innovation has been convincingly challenged. The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation [RRI] combines various strands of critique and takes up the idea that research and innovation need to be democratized and must engage with the public in order to serve the public. The proposed future EU research funding framework programme, Horizon Europe, excludes a specific program line on research in RRI. We propose a number of steps the European Parliament should take to institutionalize RRI in Horizon
With “Horizon Europe”, the European Commission sets out the framework for research and innovation in Europe over the next seven years. The proposal outlines the contours of an innovative science policy that is open and responsive to societal needs, and where societal actors jointly undertake missions to discover sustainable solutions to present-day and future challenges. In our commentary we point to a number of modifications needed to strengthen the cross-cutting implementation of activities for societal engagement and responsible research and innovation.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Bjørn BedstedLise BitschLars KlüverRasmus Øjvind NielsenMarie Louise Jørgensen
This is an overview of the programs hosted by the Chicago Children's Musuem (CCM) and the Evanston Public Library (EPL). There were a total of eight programs at the CCM:
"Making Stringed Instruments" with Dustin, head of Tinkering School Chicago
"Making Swing Sets" with Dan, a mechanical engineer
"Making Fan-Powered Cars" with Jason, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of Project SYNCERE
"Making Wings" with Anna, a costume engineer
"Wired Up" a project involving circuits with Jason, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of Project SYNCERE
"Robots and Dirt" a project using
This poster was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CA in April 2019.
Young children have been described as immersed in a diverse world of personal stories, with different structures and functions, through family narrative practices (Miller, Chen & Olivera, 2014). Drawing on story schema theory (Mandler, 1978) and linguistic approaches to the analysis of narrative form (Labov, 1982), personal narratives that support learning and remembering must include evaluation of actions, and emotions, to convey what is meaningful and memorable
This poster was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CA in April 2019.
The project's goal is to identify and document effective processes for engaging engineering experts to lead inquiry based programs in ways that advance STEM learning opportunities for children and families.
The EEE project focused on creating approaches for engineering experts to incorporate objects and oral narratives into family STEM programs. The engineering experts included tinkerers, mechanical, nuclear and costume engineers, with varying levels of experience and backgrounds. These experts work with the research team, Museum and Library, to create a workshop or program where children and their families can create a novel project following engineering concepts.
Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Gabriele GadermaierDaniel DorlerFlorian HeiglStefan MayrJohannes RudisserRobert BrodschneiderChristine Marizzi