The Great Lakes Museum of Science, Environment, and Technology will develop a 10,000 sq. ft. exhibit focusing on The Great Lakes Environment. Addressing the core mission of the museum, the exhibit will promote understanding about "the interdependence of scientific, environmental, and technological activities in the Great Lakes Region." The exhibit will focus on the Great Lakes as an ecosystem. By means of interactive activities, visitors will learn how this ecosystem was formed, the web of life it supports, the stresses it receives, and the efforts to restore its health. The Great Lakes Museum is a new 165,000 sq. ft. facility located in downtown Cleveland on the Lake Erie Shore and is scheduled to open in 1996. The exhibit area will cover 50,000 sq. ft. and will be fully accessible. An entire floor will be dedicated to the Great Lakes Environment. Complementary educational programs will consist of the following: take home activity guides to encourage the discovery and exploration of ecosystems in backyards or neighborhoods, pre and post visit activities for school groups, and teacher enhancement activities. Museum staff are participating in the planning process for the Urban Systemic Initiative of Cleveland and activiites and content of exhibits will be developed to complement the curriculum. The museum will develop a menu of activities and databases for electronic networking with homes and schools. They will have video conferencing capabilities to connect the museum with classrooms.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Richard CoyneTimothy LargePauline Fong
The Exploratorium proposes to create a multidimensional exhibition on the theme of navigation. The exhibition proper will contain approximately 20 new interactive exhibits dealing with topics of human orientation, wayfinding/exploration, the importance of time in navigation, maps and navigation traditions. Alongside the exhibits we will display real navigational artifacts borrowed from other museums. We have identified approximately 40 existing exhibits which, while not in the main show, will receive textual modification to show their relation to navigational topics. In addition to the exhibition of artifacts and interactive exhibits, we will present a series of lectures, theme weekends, and demonstrations of navigational techniques. During the run of the show we will host a Symposium On The American Encounter wherein we will hold an open forum of lectures and discussion of historical, anthropological and social consequences of cultural encounter on the North American Continent. We will produce both a brochure and a high quality catalog for this show. In addition we will create written "pathways" of organization of this museum-wide show to bring to focus different features and approaches to navigation. Our education departments will play a leading role in creating more formal programs for our visitors. The physical show will be reproduced in a travelling version to tour nine venues in the three years following its opening at the Exploratorium. We will collect the results of our researchers in a dissemination package to be made available to others in the field.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Thomas HumphreyPeter RichardsMichael Pearce
The Science Museum of Connecticut (SMC) proposes a three- year exhibit project called The State of the Environment. This cost-effective project will serve over 500,000 citizens a year by producing two permanent exhibits - 2400 sf for SMC and 400 sf for SMD's Roaring Brook Nature Center -- and eight traveling exhibits for use primarily in connecticut's Priority schools. These innovative exhibits use highly accurate sculptural relief maps which are animated by laser graphics and responsive to visitor inquiries through a research-calibre database containing vast information on Connecticut's environment. Thorough evaluation will help SMC design visitor experiences that make map-database interaction attractive, easy to use and understand, and educationally satisfying. State accredited teacher workshops will give educators a firm grasp of database capabilities prior to its use in the traveling exhibits for schools. Traveling exhibits will support goals in Connecticut's NSF-funded Statewide Initiative. Teacher's Guides will facilitate in-dept investigations for high school science lessons. These exhibits will provide hands- on experiences with professional tools for environmental research, show how environmental maps are made, teach basic principles of environmental science, and provide-in-depth information about the ecology of an entire state.
The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Texas will develop a 4,000 square-foot traveling science exhibit on FORENSICS: The Science of Criminal Investigation for circulation to eight major U.S. Cities through the Science Museum Exhibit Collaborative (SMEC). FORENSICS will examine the scientific methods and technologies used in today's crime labs. Core science areas are: DNA profiling; Fingerprinting; Firearms Identification; Evidence Collection; Composites; Forensic Anthropology; Forensic Entomology; Forensic Geology; Odontology; Pathology; Serology; toxicology; Trace Evidence. The development of FORENSICS will draw from the expertise of a distinguished panel of forensic scientists, law enforcement officers, and science educators. FORENSICS will foster science process skills, problem-solving, and deductive reasoning by challenging visitors to solve a crime mystery. A Teacher's Resource Guide to the exhibit will promote indepth classroom investigations of forensics for middle grade (5-9) science lessons. The exhibit will open in Fort Worth in May of 1993, and then tour nationally to eight major U.S. cities, serving over 2.5 million American citizens during its SMEC travel itinerary.
The videodisc-based exhibit, the Powers of Ten in Time, will allow museum visitors to explore the unseen world of natural change - events that occur too quickly or too slowly to be perceived. Through the use of a touch screen and interactive software, users will be able to, in effect, speed up or slow down timeto witness changes that lie outside of the limits of human time perception. Visitors will see scenes such as a forest recovering after a fire, a wall of earth crumbling from erosion, tides coming in and out, the intricate motions of complex machinery and molecules colliding and reacting to produce fire. The videodiscs will contain more than 100 short video segments depicting a wide range of phenomena. We will use time-lapse footage, slow-motion clips and animations to show changes occurring over time periods form 300,000,000 to femtoseconds. Not only will museum visitors be able to watch these video segments at their own pace and in order they choose, they will also be able to learn more about such phenomena through on- screen textual and graphical explanations. The goal of the project is to engage museum visitors with captivating photographic segments, explain the phenomena shown with supplemental text and graphics, and stimulate them to look at the world in a new way - not just with their eyes, but with their minds and imaginations.
WGBH/Boston in association with the Chedd-Angier Production plan the production of a series of five one hour public television programs on the environmental history of North America, "A Continent Transformed". Each of the programs will emphasize a key process which has shaped American environmental history: biological invasion, drawing boundaries, linking transportation and market systems, projecting ideals onto the landscape, and increasing the pace and complexity of systematic change. The principal author of the series and its on camera host will be William Cronin, a leading ecological historian. The series will be assisted by a prestigious Advisory Board, educational materials will be developed for series classrom use, and 8 million viewers should see each episode when the series airs in the Fall of 1992. NSF support will represent approximately 10% of the project total.
Project Enhanced Science Learning (PESL) offers learning partners opportunities to engage in authentic scientific inquiry through apprenticeship. Such inquiry is often enabled by dynamic interactions among learning partners in physical proximity. Yet scientific and business practice using Internet and broadband services recognizes that not all partners necessary to an interaction can be co-located. Our vision uses new technologies to extend the collaborative "reach" of PESL to include diverse expertise among remote learners, teachers, and scientists. This work, in atmospheric sciences, extends collaborative media beyond asynchronous text-only email to shared workspaces and two-way audio/video connections that allow for collaborative visualization of science phenomena, data, models - What You See Is What I See (WYSIWIS). Tools for local- and wide-area networked learning environments will enable highly interactive, media-rich communications among learning partners. Research on these learning architectures will provide pedagogy and social protocols for authenticating the science learning experience in classrooms and other spaces. Greater motivation to learn and enhanced science learning in terms of more valid, performance assessments should result from students' participations. The next decade brings widespread, networked multi-media interpersonal computing. This project will provide a blueprint to inform the effective use of interpersonal collaborative media for science education.
The museum of Science proposes to travel a 3,000 square foot exhibit entitled "Bogs". The exhibit will introduce a poorly understood habitat, acidic wetlands, in an interdisciplinary way. the peculiar physical features of bogs has led to a popular view of them as fearful and unhealthy places. This view has led in turn, to their destruction. To show the value of bogs, the exhibit will display their unique natural history. In addition, the exhibit will explore the relationship between people and bogs in modern and pre-historic times. in Europe and in North America. The exhibit will debut at the Museum of Science, and then tour to other museums in North America.
The program producers at the World Media Foundation seek $550,000 over three years to produce and present to listeners vital stories about scientific inquiry and technological developments related to environmental change. These presentations, entitled Living on Earth, are broadcast weekly on more that 240 National Public Radio member stations in the United States. The producer intends to develop the program into a one-hour format from the current 30 minute broadcast. Audience participation will be encouraged through call-in question and answer sessions about science and ecology.
South Carolina Educational Television Network will secure rights for one additional PBS broadcast plus three additional years of off-air recording for educational purposes. In 1990, NSF awarded $367,430 to the South Carolina Educational Network toward production and dissemination of a television series entitled, "Spaceship Earth." The series takes a satellite's-eye view of the Earth, providing a unified look at the rich variety and interdependency of life and land on our planet. Topics considered in the programs include: an overview of a new global geography, population, earth's crust, world markets, weather, seas and oceans, rivers, forests, food, and "the watchkeepers," Earth's inhabitants who are responsible for its well-being. That series was completed and broadcast over a three year period. During that time it attract large general audiences and was widely used in schools. There is continued interest is use of the series, however, broadcast and off-air taping rights have expired. South Carolina Educational Television also will develop and disseminate promotional material to alert audiences and teachers of the continued availability of the project.
The daily radio series EARTH AND SKY began airing nationally on September 30, 1991. It consists of 2-minute programs about Earth science and astronomy. Produced in association with the American Geophysical Union, it is designed for people of all ages. Its aim is to make science accessible and interesting to millions whose common bond is that they happen to be listening to the radio. On February 1, 1992, the series was airing on 63 commercial and public radio stations, which had paid for it, and the number of stations was growing. Producers and hosts Deborah Byrd and Joel Block were responsible for 5,000 daily programs in the award- winning STAR DATE radio series. Partial support is requested for the production, distribution and promotion of 780 programs in the EARTH AND SKY series. The goal for the grant period is to acquire a large listening audience via heavy promotion. After three years, EARTH AND SKY will be self-supporting on 371 stations, more stations than for any previous series of this king.
WHALES, SHARKS & THINGS IN THE DARK - A 70MM IMAX FILM is the first science museum and aquarium film in the 70MM large-screen format to present the diversity of life in the oceans in a science context. Through a unique collaboration of a national environmental education group, a leading non-profit science center, and with the co-operation of a federal agency, the project's main objective is to convey to a general and school- age audience a view of the richness and range of life in the underwater realm -- from the deep sea creatures to whales and sharks and other marine life. Narratively, the film will proceed through the water column and selected food webs, showing the relationships in the complex skein of life--including human. The audience will be guided by explorers and role-model scientists, such as Dr. Sylvia Earle, an enthusiastic and well- known oceanographer, and three other sets of characters involved in marine science and exploration. The content will highlight a range of scientific disciplines, including marine biology, engineering, geology, physics, and oceanography, and it will shed light on the entire study of the oceans as a career path, and as an area for further investigation. Accompanied by a educational package delivered and supported by all three groups, this film will have wide impact, reaching a projected 8 million U.S. viewers within two years.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Christopher PalmerDavid ClarkLeighton TaylorPaul Hanle