Open Exhibits has released a suite of open source multitouch-enabled exhibit modules and templates with the goal of transforming the way in which museum professionals and other informal educators assemble interactive computer-based exhibits for use in museums and other informal settings. Ideum Inc., proposes a full-scale development project that will develop, test, and disseminate a free suite of original, multitouch-enabled, open source exhibit software that will transform the ability of science museum professionals to assemble interactive computer-based exhibits for use in museums and on the Web. The project offers a novel approach to exhibit development that enhances the interoperability of science content and computer-based exhibit authoring tools to promote cyber-learning in informal settings. Open Exhibits will fulfill the need for a shared platform for interactive computer-based exhibits, driven by the exponential growth of cyber-learning and the need to streamline resources and investment in the exhibit development field. There has been a rapid rise in the development and use of open source software, but few of these technologies have been designed specifically to meet the needs of the ISE field, and few have been applied directly to enhancing the visitor experience. Open Exhibits will provide a model that promotes the sharing of technology, provides access to high-quality flexible tools to develop interactive computer-based exhibits, and strengthens cyber-infrastructure for the ISE field. It will also make interactive and new media technologies more accessible for small and rural museums with limited funding. The project will develop a library of extensible software modules for all major platforms that exhibit developers can configure in specific ways. These modules (developed using the popular Adobe Flash and Flex authoring tools) will be configured as three flexible templates that have broad application across the ISE field: 1) a current science news aggregator, 2) a timeline-based exhibit, and 3) a collections viewer. The templates will also be available in the form of universal modules that more advanced users can mix and match to build customized exhibits, allowing for modification that will yield further advancements to the software. Ideum will work closely with three partner museums: The Don Harrington Discovery Center (Amarillo, TX), Maxwell Museum of Anthropology (Albuquerque, NM), and New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science (Albuquerque, NM) which represent a broad range of STEM topical areas, and the content that they develop will show the breadth of possibilities of the software modules and templates. Other deliverables include a mini-summit to convene museum and technology experts; user support strategies; and a community of practice centered around OpenExhibits.org that will standardize interoperability and design principles and serve as a hub for user support, prototype downloads, and as an exhibit showcase.
TERC, in partnership with the Boston Museum of Science, will investigate deaf and hard-of-hearing museum visitors' use of App-based signing math and science dictionaries delivered on the iPod Touch. The project is employing a mixed-methods design to study how and the extent to which family visitors, ages 5-12+, and classroom visitors in grades K-12 use the dictionaries to access and communicate about exhibit content and engage in activities. Study participants will visit one of two preselected exhibit areas and do several activities that have Word Lists posted on the activity panels. The Word Lists include key terms for the activity that are also included in at least one of the dictionaries. They will then do several activities that do not have Word Lists posted. A coin toss will be used to randomly assign the first group of visitors to a starting Word List condition. The second group will then begin with the alternate Word List condition. From this point on, subsequent groups will continue to alternate the starting point. Data collection will include observation, videotaping, interviews, and surveys. Results of the study will be disseminated through a report of findings, presentations and publications.
The Louisiana State Museum and Tulane University/Xavier University Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, along with several other research collaborators, designers, evaluators, and the Times-Picayune newspaper are partnering to develop a multi-pronged approach on educating the general public, school children, teachers and public officials on the STEM-related aspects of Hurricane Katrina and its implications for the future of New Orleans and other parts of the country. The major products will be an 8,500 square-foot semi-permanent exhibit, smaller exhibits for Louisiana regional libraries, a comprehensive Web site on hurricanes, a set of studies on informal learning, a case study for public officials about the relevance of science research to policy and planning, teacher workshops, and a workshop for interested exhibit designers from around the country. This project advances the field of informal science education by exploring how museums, universities, and their communities can work together to provide meaningful learning experiences on STEM topics that are critical to solving important community and national issues.
MIT Education Arcade, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, designed and developed Vanished, an eight-week environmental science game as a new genre called the curated game, a hybrid of museum-going, social networking, and online gaming. Middle school aged participants engaged in Earth systems science to study a range of environmental issues associated with mass extinction. Though the game was structured around a fictional scenario--communication with visitors from the future--it posited a future affected by current environmental issues and conditions, and encouraged participants to apply systems thinking as a means to understand how these current conditions led to environmental disruptions. As part of the game play participants studied, applied, and integrated knowledge and skills from multiple sources, including Earth science, ecology, astronomy, and archaeology, and forensic anthropology. An Advisory Board and contributing scientists were be involved. The project team is currently analyzing data collected from the game to test the hypothesis that the game play would allow youth, ages 11-14, to increase their understanding of the scientific process and increase their motivation to learn more science. This summative evaluation is being conducted by TERC Inc. A Curated Game Handbook will be produced to disseminate project results as a model for new applications of game-based learning. Open source software created as part of the game has been made available, and should enable future developers in informal science education to build directly upon these foundational efforts.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Eric KlopferConrad LabandeiraScot OsterweilStephanie Norby
This EAGER grant supported initial exploratory work on the utility and feasibility of providing informal science education (ISE) educators with access to current and relevant peer-reviewed research findings. The investigators of the Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) in San Francisco and London and the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center at the University of Washington selected some 200 peer-reviewed research studies from published journals and translated them into practitioner-friendly language. The translations sought to explicitly note the relevance of the findings to informal science education contexts. The translated abstracts were posted on a website that was field tested with some 500 ISE practitioners to determine whether the translations and presentations of the research were accessible and usable. The audience during this exploratory phase was educators who design and lead science education programs for children and youth in informal settings such as museums, botanical gardens, youth development organizations, after-school programs, and different media-based contexts, such as web, television, and radio. The research summaries provided these educators, who often do not have access to published research journals, with information about learning progressions, curriculum design and sequencing, use of new media, building on the cultural resources of children, the nature of scientific argumentation, and education policy. The journals covered included those oriented primarily towards researchers (Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Journal of the Learning Sciences, Studies in Science Education, International Journal of Science Education) as well as practitioners (Curator, Science Communication, Journal for Education in Museums, and Afterschool Matters).
Independent Production Fund is producing a three-part public television series focusing on the latest research in the science of music. The programs will explore how cutting-edge science is revealing new connections between music and the human mind and body, the natural world and the cosmos. The series will follow researchers from a variety of fields including physiology, neuroscience, psychology, biology, physics and education, as they use groundbreaking techniques and technologies to unravel age-old mysteries about music\'s persistence, universality and emotional power. It will show how these researchers are shedding valuable new light on the way brains work. The impact of the programs will be extended through a content-rich companion web site and innovative formal and informal educational-outreach materials to both middle and high school age students, as well as a complementary radio component. Mannes Productions will produce the series; Goodman Research Group will conduct formative evaluation and Rockman et al will conduct summative evaluation.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Institute for Learning Innovation, and several environmental organizations are merging existing bird-focused citizen science programs with gardening and online social networking activities to provide older adult learners (age 35 and up) with opportunities to investigate the environmental impacts of implementing landscaping and carbon-reducing practices in their backyards, community gardens, and parks. The YardMap Network project is developing learning resources that will help gardeners, birders, and novices learn bird-habitat improving and carbon-reducing living practices by joining a nationwide ecological social network composed of more than 100,000 people. The goal of the project is to create online learning communities that move people from basic and intermediate levels ecological understanding to advanced levels of understanding by providing experiences whereby YardMappers learn about, design, evaluate, share, and invent conservation practices in their backyards and other green spaces. While developing the network, the project will gather data to test the hypothesis that coupling citizen science activities with social networking technologies to create online learning communities improves participants\' understanding of project-relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The project will track learning outcomes using standard evaluation techniques and by following individuals\' routes of entry, network interactions, mapped garden practices, carbon-neutral behaviors, and their bird monitoring activities. YardMappers will divide naturally into treatment groups, creating a quasi-experimental design to test the importance of social networking for basic, intermediate, and advanced learning outcomes.
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
Cosmic Serpent - Bridging Native and Western Science Learning in Informal Settings is a four-year collaboration between the Indigenous Education Institute and the University of California-Berkeley targeting informal science education professionals. This project is designed to explore the commonalities between western science and native science in the context of informal science education. The intended impacts are to provide informal science education professionals with the skills and tools to gain an understanding of the commonalities between native and western worldviews; create regional networks that bridge native and museum communities; develop science education programs in which learners cross cultural borders between western science and indigenous peoples; and meet the needs of diverse audiences using culturally-responsive approaches to science learning. Participants are introduced to topics in physical, earth, space, and life science, using an interdisciplinary approach. Deliverables include professional development workshops, peer mentoring, museum programs for public audiences, a project website, and media products for use in programs and exhibits. Additionally, regional partnerships between museums and native communities, a legacy document, and a culminating conference jointly hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian and the Association of Science and Technology Centers will promote future sustainability. Strategic impact is realized through participants' increased understanding of native and western science paradigms, museum programs that reflect commonalities in the two approaches, partnerships between museums and native communities, and increased institutional capacity to engage native audiences in science. This project directly impacts 270 informal educators at 96 science centers and tribal/cultural museums nationally while the resulting programs will reach an estimated 200,000 museum visitors.
The Children's Museum of San Jose, in collaboration with developmental psychology researchers at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and science and education staff of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), is conducting a 48-month long project that focuses on children's use of evidence to construct scientific explanations. Key deliverables are: a 2,300 square-foot paleontology exhibit with an Evidence Central area three "evidence hubs" at the Children's Museum of San Jose, an educational Web site developed by UCMP, research on children's use of evidence conducted by Maureen Callanan's research group at UCSC, a "state of the children's museum field" study on varieties of perspectives on "science" and "evidence," and professional development experiences for staff at children's museums. Additional partners include the children's museums in Austin, TX, Madison, WI, and Providence, RI and local Vietnamese and Latino organizations in the museum's neighborhood. Randi Korn & Associates will conduct the program summative evaluation process and the "state of the field" study. The project identifies and will work to address two specific needs in the field: (a) a clearer sense of the developmental progression of children's understanding of evidence, and (b) a rigorous and systematic investigation of children's open-ended reasoning about evidence in a rich content domain (paleontology). The strategic impact goal is to build capacity in children's museums, enabling them to offer more evidence-based science learning experiences for their visitors.
Portal to the Public is a program designed to assist informal science education (ISE) institutions as they seek to bring scientists and public audiences together in face-to-face public interactions that promote appreciation and understanding of current scientific research and its application. Led by Pacific Science Center (WA), in collaboration with Explora (NM), the North Museum of Natural History and Science (PA) and the Institute for Learning Innovation (MD), the program model was implemented and evaluated at five additional museums and science centers during 2007-2011. The project goals were to create a flexible and scalable guiding framework that would support ISE institutions build relationships with their local scientific community, design professional development workshops for scientists, and create public program formats featuring scientists. The project included thorough research and evaluation of the guiding framework, dissemination process, and implementation at expansion sites. The Portal to the Public project team has produced an Implementation Manual as a guide for institutions planning to implement a Portal to the Public-type program, available for download at the project website (http://www.pacificsciencecenter.org/Portal-to-the-Public/portal). It includes the Catalog of Professional Development Elements, a practical guide to creating and facilitating professional development experiences for scientists.
The project conducts action research to learn more about how different groups use technology in meaningful ways, develops approaches that significantly increase access for underrepresented groups, and proposes ways in which technology might be modified or redesigned to engage, address, and represent diverse populations. The project targets children and young people from groups underrepresented with technology, informal and formal educators, community groups and organizations, researchers, policymakers and funders, industry, and the public. Products include: a report on the state of access of underrepresented groups to technology; case studies; guides to increasing community access to technology; guidelines about how to be critical viewers, users, and makers of technology; report on the issues involved in producing diverse and equitable technology design; exemplars and ideas for diversifying technology design; suggestions for software publishers and industry; commissioned papers on issues of access and design for particular underrepresented groups; an agenda for action; and interactive World Wide Web site; and a popular press book that synthesizes the knowledge gained through this project.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
ellen wahlYolanda GeorgeEric JollyLaura JeffersAndres Henriquez