During its first year, more than 1500 people signed up to be a part of Open Exhibits. Participation ranged from reading blog posts, to trying a few software modules or using Open Exhibits software to develop actual exhibition components. This report highlights findings about the emerging community and trends in Open Exhibits participation.
The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 Museum Edition, is a coproduction with the Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), and examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in education and interpretation within the museum environment. The international composition of the advisory board reflects the care with which a global perspective for the report was assembled. While there are many local factors affecting the adoption and use of emerging technologies in museums, there are also issues that transcend regional boundaries and questions we all face. It was with
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Larry JohnsonHolly Witchey
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
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
Many tasks in graphical user interfaces require users to interact with elements at various levels of precision. We present FingerGlass, a bimanual technique designed to improve the precision of graphical tasks on multitouch screens. It enables users to quickly navigate to different locations and across multiple scales of a scene using a single hand. The other hand can simultaneously interact with objects in the scene. Unlike traditional pan-zoom interfaces, FingerGlass retains contextual information during the interaction. We evaluated our technique in the context of precise object selection
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Dominik K¨aserManeesh AgrawalaMark Pauly
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Open Exhibits held a Design Summit bringing together 30 professionals from the field to help guide future development. The Design Summit was convened in Corrales, New Mexico near the design studios of Ideum, the principal organization of Open Exhibits. It was held March 9th to 11th of 2011. Attendees came from large and small science centers, planetariums, zoos, local museums, and several other open source software initiatives. They were educators, evaluators, designers, researchers, software engineers, and museum professionals. Participants engaged in a combination of short presentations
Despite a long history of using participatory methods to enable public engagement with issues of societal importance, interactive displays have only recently been explored for this purpose. In this paper, we evaluate a tabletop game called Futura, which was designed to engage the public with issues of sustainability. Our design is grounded in prior research on public displays, serious games, and computer supported collaborative learning. We suggest that a role-based, persistent simulation style game implemented on a multi-touch tabletop affords unique opportunities for a walk-up-and-play style
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alissa N. AntleJoshua TanenbaumAllen BevansKatie SeabornSijie Wang
Modern smartphones contain sophisticated sensors to monitor three-dimensional movement of the device. These sensors permit devices to recognize motion gestures— deliberate movements of the device by end-users to invoke commands. However, little is known about best-practices in motion gesture design for the mobile computing paradigm. To address this issue, we present the results of a guessability study that elicits end-user motion gestures to invoke commands on a smartphone device. We demonstrate that consensus exists among our participants on parameters of movement and on mappings of motion
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jim SpadacciniJaime RuizYang LiEdward Lank
The investigators will collect data on a broad range of informal science education activities of an existing sample of approximately 3,500 adults across the U.S. It will relate these activities to prior forms of science involvement and to various indicators of lifelong STEM learning. The proposed work is an extension of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY), a study funded by NSF since 1986 and still ongoing. Prior work has tracked two national cohorts of students who were originally representative of public middle and high schools, focusing on their science and mathematics course enrollment, content, achievement, and career choices, and informed by data from their parents and teachers. The project team has maintained very high levels of continued participation by the approximately 5,000 students, now aged 34-38, many of whom have families of their own. The project will extend the planned surveys for 2009 and 2010 to examine how these adults use informal science education resources such as museums, libraries, books, magazines, newspapers, television, and the Internet. The project will provide baseline data on informal science education resource use in the Internet era for a large and diverse sample. It will allow investigation of the relationships of current informal science learning behaviors, both individual and intergenerational, to prior learning variables such as school science achievement, parental involvement, college experience, career choice, and prior use of informal learning resources while respondents were school-aged.
The investigators will collect data on a broad range of informal science education activities of an existing sample of approximately 3,500 adults across the U.S. It will relate these activities to prior forms of science involvement and to various indicators of lifelong STEM learning. The proposed work is an extension of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY), a study funded by NSF since 1986 and still ongoing. Prior work has tracked two national cohorts of students who were originally representative of public middle and high schools, focusing on their science and mathematics course enrollment, content, achievement, and career choices, and informed by data from their parents and teachers. The project team has maintained very high levels of continued participation by the approximately 5,000 students, now aged 34-38, many of whom have families of their own. The project will extend the planned surveys for 2009 and 2010 to examine how these adults use informal science education resources such as museums, libraries, books, magazines, newspapers, television, and the Internet. The project will provide baseline data on informal science education resource use in the Internet era for a large and diverse sample. It will allow investigation of the relationships of current informal science learning behaviors, both individual and intergenerational, to prior learning variables such as school science achievement, parental involvement, college experience, career choice, and prior use of informal learning resources while respondents were school-aged.
LOOP is the working title for a multiplatform project to promote environmental and scientific literacy about sustainability for children ages 6-9 and their families. Unlike most educational materials for this age group, the LOOP approach requires the audience to learn about the interconnectedness of environmental and human systems in a cross-disciplinary manner. Produced by WGBH, the center piece of the project will be a television series designed for PBS with accompanying digital media on the web and an extensive "Get to Know Your World" outreach initiative. The U.S. Forest Service is one of the project's partners. At this development stage, the project will: -Conduct front-end research to obtain a baseline understanding about what kids know about environmental sustainability. -Further develop and test LOOP's proposed creative style. -Produce an animatic (a simple mock-up) of a full episode and accompanying live-action video, with input from Content Directors. -Perform formative evaluation to assess the learning impact of the animatic and live-action video to inform series production. Concord Evaluation Group will conduct the front-end research to assess children\'s knowledge of environmental sustainability and formative evaluation of the animatic pilot. Global Mechanic is the animation producer. The project has the potential to (1) inform the field on how to enhance young children\'s understanding of complex ecological concepts; and (2) "push the envelope" by exploring how mass media can support local environmental investigation and promote outdoor family explorations. Introducing children to systems thinking, especially around environmental subjects, could make a significant contribution to their understanding of and approach to STEM.
This report outlines the proceedings of the 2011 conference called "Art as a Way of Knowing" hosted by the Exploratorium. The purpose of the conference was to gather a broad range of artists, scientists, and educators to explore the history, practice, and value of the arts as a means of inquiring into the natural world. The conference brought together some 125 leading international thinkers— representing work in education, art and science museums, contemporary art, and interdisciplinary research. In particular, conference participants explored art practice in relation to the field of public
This paper was prepared for the symposium, "Learning Science in Out-of-School Time: Research Directions," presented at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans. The authors discuss research efforts related to the nature of afterschool science offerings in publicly funded afterschool programs for elementary school students in California and the sources of support for science programming and afterschool staff development. Findings from the Afterschool Science Network (ASN) are outlined.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Barbara MeansAnn HouseCarlin Llorente