FETCH with Ruff Ruffman, produced by WGBH, is a daily half-hour PBS television series with accompanying Web and outreach activities targeted to 6- to 10-year olds. The program brings science learning to young children by uniquely blending live-action with animation, game show convention with reality programming, and humor with academics. The intended impacts of this new season are to 1) help the target audience, especially girls and minorities, develop an interest, knowledge and skills necessary to do science; 2) help kids develop the math skills and knowledge necessary to solve science and engineering problems; and 3) bring FETCH's unique brand of informal science learning to camps across the country. The requested funds will allow the project to expand the science curriculum with 20 new half-hour episodes and expand the Web site, focusing on three new science themes that highlight topics of interest to this age group: "Animal Universe," "Science of Art," and "Adventure Science." The Web site will include four new science-based Web games that will allow kids to create and post content of their own design and interact with other FETCH fans online. In addition, funds will support new educational resources for camps, including a Camp FETCH Guide. The project will continue to work with the project's established collaborators like the Boys and Girls Clubs, Girl Scouts of America, and YMCA, as well expand the outreach via new partnerships with the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University and the American Camp Association. Christine Andrews Paulsen & Associates (CAPA) will conduct summative evaluation of both the television show and the Camp FETCH Guide.
The University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and the Museum of Science, Boston will create life-sized, 3-D Virtual Humans that will interact with visitors as interpretive guides and learning facilitators at science exhibits. Through the use of advanced artificial intelligence and intelligent tutoring techniques, Virtual Humans will provide a highly responsive functionality in their dialogue interpretation that will generate sophisticated interaction with visitors about the STEM content related to the exhibit. The project exemplifies how the confluence of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and education can creatively and collaboratively advance new tools and learning processes. The Virtual Human project will begin to present to the visitor a compelling, real life, interactive example of the future and of the related convergence of various interdisciplinary trends in technology, such as natural language voice recognition, mixed reality environments, para-holographic display, visitor recognition and prior activity recall, artificial intelligence, and other interdisciplinary trends. The 3-D, life-sized Virtual Humans will serve as museum educators in four capacities: 1) as a natural language dialogue-based interactive guide that can suggest exhibits to explore in specific galleries and answer questions about particular STEM content areas, such as computer science; 2) as a coach to help visitors understand and use particular interactive exhibits; 3) be the core focus of the Science behind the Virtual Humans exhibit; and 4) serve as an ongoing research effort to improve human and virtual human interactions at increasingly sophisticated levels of complexity. The deliverables will be designed to build upon visitor experiences and stimulate inquiry. A living lab enables visitors to become part of the research and development process. The project website will introduce visitors to the technologies used to build virtual humans and the research behind their implementation. The site will be augmented with videos and simulations and will generate user created content on virtual human characters. Project evaluation and research will collect language and behavioral data from visitors to inform the improvement of the virtual guide throughout the duration of the grant and to develop a database that directly supports other intelligent systems, and new interface design and development that will have broad impact across multiple fields.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
William SwartoutDavid TraumJacquelyn MorieDiane PiepolH. Chad Lane
A Youth-Directed Cafe Scientifique targets culturally, ethnically, and economically diverse youth ages 11-18 with a web-based program designed to engage students in active discourse on current STEM topics. Building on the adult program of the same name, this youth-centered project also provides opportunities for individual and group activities. Project partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Bradbury Science Museum, Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos Women in Science, and the University of New Mexico, which will serve as a source of scientists to act as speakers and mentors. Northern New Mexico Collefe, Santa Fe Community College, University of New Mexico, and theNew Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, as well as area high schools will host discussions and focus group meetings. Recruitment of youth participants will be carried out by New Mexico MESA as well as four local high schools. Project deliverables include a robust model for engaging youth in an active online community and Youth Leadership Teams (YLT). YLT's select topics, recruit members, and facilitate Cafe discussions and blogs. Cafe meetings enable youth to explore a topic of their choice in an online session led by a youth host in conjunction with a guest speaker. The follow-up sessions encourage more in-depth exlopration of the topic via interviews, articles, community meetings, and museum exhibits created in collaboration with the Bradbury Museum. The Cafe website will highlight youth produced podcasts, essays on science topics, and a blog. Strategic impact resulting from this project includes the development of a creattive model that effectively engages youth in STEM discourse while meeting the cultural and intellectual needs. It is anticapated that this project will serve over 5,700 youth in three years.
The New York Hall of Science and Community School District #24 request $46,744 for a planning grant whose goal is to empower parents by bringing informal science and math education experiences to create a working team of parents, teachers, and museum staff to underserved, ethnically diverse students in their formative years, and their families. A major objective is to develop a framework for a science resource kit for home use by parents and children in grades K-3, and related parent training. The target audience is low income, minority, recently immigrated parents, with little to no involvement in their children's education. Parents from the target audience will serve on the Planning Team. The function of the kits is to provide exciting, intergenerational, exploratory experiences in math and science that are related to the school curriculum. Each kit will be designed to be completely portable and will appear to be a large trunk with wheels. Contents may include: a laptop-size computer; hand lenses and two small microscopes; diffraction gratings and flourescent sources; ramps and balls; mirrors, lenses and other optics.
The Louisville Science Center and the National Center for Family Literacy will engage in a year's planning to introduce the Parent- Child Interaction Project to teams of educators in six target cities. The goal is to explore the feasibility of a future national implementation of the model. The Parent-Child Interaction Project aims to empower underserved parents to become their child's most important teacher and provide these parents and their children the opportunity to gain science, mathematics, and technology education together. The participants are the parents and pre-school children enrolled in family literacy programs. During the Project, parents and children will make at least four trips to the participating science-technology center and evaluate their trips during follow-up class sessions. The joint efforts of the family literacy programs and science- technology centers can achieve the following goals: * Improve the involvement of low-income and low-literacy parents in the education of their children, specifically in the areas of science, mathematics and technology. * Increase the awareness of local science and technology centers as available community resources, particularly for underserved audiences. * Use science center visits and related projects to extend NCFL classroom learning for adult education students, their children and their teachers.
The project includes a simulation based Family Learning Program to be administered through the International Challenger Learning Center (CLC) network. The goal is to develop families' skills in learning as a team through science, math and technology (SMT) in an environment where parents and children are co-travelers in a world of ideas. PACCT is disseminated through ten of the Challenger Learning Centers reaching 22,000 families nationwide. Many of these activities are completed in the home at no cost to the anticipated 12,500 participating families. Through this network of centers, all types of communities are served in many states. The activities include Sim-U-Voyages, where family teams work at home; Sim-U-Challenges, where families create a physical model responding to a challenge; Sim-U-Visits, where families hear from scientists and work as scientists in a team solving a problem; and Sim-U-Ventures, which result in flying a mission. Cost sharing is 8%.
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science proposed to develop an outreach science and mathematics program with a parent involvement and teacher enhancement professional development component. The goals of the project are as follows: (1) to involve parents in their children's education; (2) to promote a positive attitude on behalf of parents and students toward science and mathematics; (3) to increase teachers' level of comfort in teaching science; and (4) to enhance teacher's confidence in the hands-on approach as an effective method for teaching science. The objectives for the parent component of this project are: acquaint parents with the national and state science education goals and standards; introduce parents to activities that can be done at home with children; and provide families with materials and activity sheets that can be used at home. The objectives for the teacher component of this project are: (1) to provide teachers with opportunities for increased communication with parents about science literacy for children; (2) provide professional development for teachers on the use of hands-on science activities in the classroom; and (3) to providing bilingual activity guides and kits containing materials to encourage science learning. The methods for implementing this project will be varied according to the needs of the target audiences. Parents and children will be engaged through parent workshops and multi-aged children's activities conducted at the museum by experienced science educators. The professional development for teachers' component of this project will include an extensive summer workshop, on-going training/ planning sessions during the school calendar year and session on the uses of the bilingual teaching manuals. The cost sharing for this NSF award is 46.7% of the total project cost.
The Delta Research and Education Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) request $50,000 to plan a project titled: Parents as Partners in Science, Mathematics and Technology. The planning process will use focus groups involving 15-25 participants in seven geographical sites. During the planning process, information will be collected to design and test an integrative model using innovative materials, strategies and experiences for parents to help support the work of their daughters in SMT content. Further, the model will demonstrate techniques for use by parents with their children. These techniques will be designed for use in the education of their daughters by assisting them in gaining the knowledge, skills and attitudes required for empowering stakeholders to advocate for universally available, high-quality SMT education for their children.
WGBH is producing Seasons II and III of ZOOM, a television series featuring kids that gives viewers in the 8- to 11-year-old range a chance to explore, experiment, and share their creativity with the world. Each season would consist of 40, daily, half-hour shows -- each including a number of science and/or mathematics segments. A unique aspect of ZOOM is that every idea and activity on the show comes from a child who writes or e-mails the show and who is credited on-air for his or her contribution. Production staff and a working group of advisors with expertise in science and math education take these raw ideas and develop them into program segments and outreach projects designed to encourage "habits of mind" -- a set of problem-solving skills and dispositions toward science and math that has been developed in concert with the advisors. Three over-arching science and math-based themes also guide the way science and math are presented over the course of a season. Outreach for Seasons II and III will build on the solid base of outreach developed for Season I, and will consist of: ZOOMerang: Every child who communicates with ZOOM will get something back such as a compilation of science and math activities, jokes, poems, recipes and a series update. ClubZOOM: A set of standards-based science and math activities will be developed along with guidance for how to create after-school clubs. This effort will be pilot tested at 20 sites. ZOOMzones: These are areas in science-technology centers and museums that are devoted to ZOOM and include opportunities for youth and families to interact with science and math content featured on ZOOM. Ten pilot ZOOMzone sites were developed for Season I (from 80 applications). The number of ZOOMzones will be increased and continuing support will be offered to existing sites during Seasons II and III. ZOOMdays: During Season III, WGBH will develop ZOOMdays at shopping malls to reach youth who may not have access to ZOOMzones or ClubZOOM. ZOOMweb site: This web site provides an outreach extension to the TV series by collecting and sharing submissions; illustrating and producing science and math activities; creating a ZOOM community; providing research links to other sites; and aiding adults who are interested in furthering ZOOM's science and math activities in their homes, classrooms, museums and after-school programs.
Alice is a traveling exhibition based on Lewis Carroll's beloved classic Alice in Wonderland. Alice will open in early 2001, first in San Jose and subsequently at mid-size children's museums and science centers across the country. It is projected that over the four years of traveling this exhibition around the United States, a target audience of more than two million people will view the project. The target audience for the exhibition is young children age 3-8 years old, with an emphasis on attracting girls and minorities, populations traditionally underserved in science and mathematics, together with their parents and teachers. Alice takes the link between curiosity and explanation as its rationale, using its eponymous heroine's dream-adventure as a framework for activities that will help children and adults build a shared foundation for mathematics and science literacy. The designer for the project will be Koem Liem, a recognized exhibit developer.
The New York City Board of Education Community School District #18 requests $862,790 to design a Parent Involvement in Science, Mathematics, and Technology Program. The program is designed to stimulate parents to become informed, active proponents for high quality and more universally available science, mathematics, and technology education for their children. The SMART Parents project team would design and disseminate strategies to enable parents to support their children's science, mathematics, and technology education. Innovative materials and strategies will be developed that will actively engage over 6,000 parents/families over the thirty-eight (38) months duration of the project. Almost 20,000 families will become involved in the leadership-training component of this project. The initiative will assist parents in supporting their children's education in science, mathematics, and technology education. Ultimately, the project will enhance parents' knowledge and understanding of Informal Science Education.
This project, Project PARTNERS (Parents: Allies Reinforcing Technology and Neighborhood Educators Reinforcing Science) supports parents and their children in learning the mathematics and science taught in the schools. The Bronx Educational Alliance (BEA), in collaboration with Lehman College, School District Nine, the Bronx High School Superintendency, and the Bronx Federation of High School Parent Association Presidents, provides a four-month Parent Academy twice a year. Thirty-six parents (20 elementary, 6 middle and 10 high school), from 18 Bronx schools in three K-12 corridors with which the BEA Resource/Outreach Center for Parents currently works, participate in each Academy, reaching 360 over five years. Project PARTNERS goals are to: 1) increase student achievement in 18 Corridor Schools through meaningful parental support; 2) provide parent training in Math, Science and Technology and enable parents to understand the New Standards; 3) develop skills to reinforce their children's learning at home; and 4) model how to effectively learn in science-rich informal educational institutions. Parents meet on Saturdays twice a month for six hours. On one Saturday they team with a teacher and child to visit a science rich institution. On the other Saturday they learn to use computer software programs which support MST, and math concepts through games and manipulatives. Incentives for parents include learning computer skills and stipends of $300 upon completion. The BEA Academies coordinate with the BUSI and District's Family Math and Family Science workshops.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Herminio MartinezMarietta Saravia-Shore