In this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively.
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Jack ShanleyCamillia MatukOded NovGraham Dove
This paper presents synthesized research on where XR is most effective within a museum setting and what impact XR might have on the visitor experience.
Mid-America Science Museum will implement a professional development program for its education staff and those from member museums of the Arkansas Discovery Network. Museum staffers will participate in a series of three day-long workshops on robotics, app development, and microprocessors. Workshop follow-up will be in the form of strategically scheduled internet-based meetings, an online community, and various methods of evaluation. The program will provide up-to-date professional development and training in newer technologies for educators in the museum and from across Arkansas. Training will encourage these educators to develop their own activities to increase audience engagement and use modern technology to create powerful professional development opportunities for teachers. The project will advance the museum's strategic goal of being a leader in informal science education and creating professional development opportunities for museum educators across the region.
This project investigates long-term human-robot interaction outside of controlled laboratory settings to better understand how the introduction of robots and the development of socially-aware behaviors work to transform the spaces of everyday life, including how spaces are planned and managed, used, and experienced. Focusing on tour-guiding robots in two museums, the research will produce nuanced insights into the challenges and opportunities that arise as social robots are integrated into new spaces to better inform future design, planning, and decision-making. It brings together researchers from human geography, robotics, and art to think beyond disciplinary boundaries about the possible futures of human-robot co-existence, sociality, and collaboration. Broader impacts of the project will include increased accessibility and engagement at two partner museums, interdisciplinary research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students, a short video series about the current state of robotic technology to be offered as a free educational resource, and public art exhibitions reflecting on human-robot interactions. This project will be of interest to scholars of Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography as well as museum administrators, educators and the general public.
This interdisciplinary project brings together Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography to explore the production of social space through emerging forms of HRI. The project broadly asks: How does the deployment of social robots influence the production of social space—including the functions, meanings, practices, and experiences of particular spaces? The project is based on long-term ethnographic observation of the development and deployment of tour-guiding robots in an art museum and an earth science museum. A social roboticist will develop a socially-aware navigation system to add nuance to the robots’ socio-spatial behavior. A digital artist will produce digital representations of the interactions that take place in the museum, using the robot’s own sensor data and other forms of motion capture. A human geographer will conduct interviews with museum visitors and staff as well as ethnographic observation of the tour-guiding robots and of the roboticists as they develop the navigation system. They will produce an ethnographic analysis of the robots’ roles in the organization of the museums, everyday practices of museum staff and visitors, and the differential experiences of the museum space. The intellectual merits of the project consist of contributions at the intersections of STS, robotics, and human geography examining the value of ethnographic research for HRI, the development of socially-aware navigation systems, the value of a socio-spatial analytic for understanding emerging forms of robotics, and the role of robots within evolving digital geographies.
This project is jointly funded by the Science and Technology Studies program in SBE and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program in EHR.
Wireless radio communications, such as Wi-Fi, transmit public and private data from one device to another, including cell phones, computers, medical equipment, satellites, space rockets, and air traffic control. Despite their critical role and prevalence, many people are unfamiliar with radio waves, how they are generated and interact with their surroundings, and why they are the basis of modern communication and navigation. This topic is not only increasingly relevant to the technological lives of today’s youth and public, it is critical to the National Science Foundation’s Industries of the Future activities, particularly in advancing wireless education and workforce development. In this project, STEM professionals from academia, industry and informal education will join forces to design, evaluate, and launch digital apps, a craft-based toolkit, activity guides, and mobile online professional learning, all of which will be easily accessed and flexibly adapted by informal educators to engage youth and the public about radio frequency communications. Experiences will include embodied activities, such as physically linking arms to create and explore longitudinal and transverse waves; mobile experiences, such as augmented reality explorations of Wi-Fi signals or collaborative signal jamming simulations; and technological exploration, such as sending and receiving encrypted messages.
BSCS Science Learning, Georgia Tech, and the Children’s Creativity Museum (CCM) with National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net) museum partners will create pedagogical activity designs, digital apps, and a mobile online professional learning platform. The project features a rigorous and multipronged research and development approach that builds on prior learning sciences studies to advance a learning design framework for nimble, mobile informal education, while incorporating the best aspects of hands-on learning. This project is testing two related hypotheses: 1) a mobile strategy can be effective for supporting just-in-time informal education of a highly technical, scientific topic, and 2) a mobile suite of resources, including professional learning, can be used to teach informal educators, youth, and the general public about radio frequency communications. Data sources include pre- and post- surveys, interviews, and focus groups with a wide array of educators and learners.
A front-end study will identify gaps in public understanding and perceptions specific to radio frequency communications, and serve as a baseline for components of the summative research. Iterative formative evaluation will incorporate participatory co-design processes with youth and informal educators. These processes will support materials that are age-appropriate and culturally responsive to not only youth, with an emphasis on Latinx youth, but also informal educators and the broader public. Summative evaluation will examine the impact of the mobile suite of resources on informal educators’ learning, facilitation confidence and intentions to continue to incorporate the project resources into their practice. The preparation of educators in supporting public understanding of highly technological STEM topics can be an effective way for supporting just-in-time public engagement and interests in related careers. Data from youth and museum visitors will examine changes to interest, science self-efficacy, content knowledge, and STEM-related career interest. If successful, this design approach may influence how mobile resources are designed and organized effectively to impact future informal education on similarly important technology-rich topics. All materials will be released under Creative Commons licenses allowing for widespread sharing and remixing; research and design findings will be published in academic, industry, and practitioner journals.
This project is co-funded by two NSF programs: The Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program, which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) engages young people in digital media production that combines journalism, design, data, and coding. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), YR Media collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s App Inventor to launch WAVES — A STEM-Powered Youth News Network for the Nation. This three-year initiative expanded YR Media’s model of informal STEM education through the launch of a national platform that utilizes STEM-powered tools to create and distribute news stories, mobile apps, and digital interactives.
Rockman et al, an
AHA! Island is a new project that uses animation, live-action videos, and hands-on activities to support joint engagement of children and caregivers around computational thinking concepts and practices. This research is intended to examine the extent to which the prototyped media and activity sets support the project’s learning goals. Education Development Center (EDC), WGBH’s research partner for the project, conducted a small formative study with 16 English-speaking families (children and their caregivers) to test out these media and activity set prototypes. During the in-person video
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. In this exploratory Change Makers project, the Concord Consortium will develop, test, and evaluate a citizen science program that leverages innovative technology, such that youth engage directly with energy issues through scientific inquiry. The project will create the Infrared Street View, a citizen science program that aims to produce a thermal version of Google's Street View using an affordable infrared camera attached to a smartphone. The infrared camera serves as a high-throughput data acquisition instrument that collects thousands of temperature data points each time a picture is taken. Youth will collect massive geotagged thermal data that have considerable scientific and educational value for visualizing energy usage and improving energy efficiency at all levels. The Infrared Street View program will provide a Web-based platform for youth and anyone interested in energy efficiency to view and analyze the aggregated data to identify possible energy losses. By sharing their scientific findings with stakeholders, youth will make changes to the way energy is being used. The project will start with school, public, and commercial buildings in selected areas where performing thermal scan of the buildings and publishing their thermal images for educational and research purposes are permitted by school leaders, town officials, and property owners. In collaboration with high schools and out-of-school programs in Massachusetts, this project will conduct pilot-tests with approximately 200 students.
To contribute to advancing learning, the study will probe three research questions: 1) Under what circumstances can technology bridge out-of-school and classroom science learning and improve learning on both sides? 2) To what extent can unobtrusive assessment based on data mining support research and evaluation of student learning in out-of-school settings? and 3) To what extent can instructional intelligence built into the app used in the program help students learn in out-of-school programs and improve the quality of data they contribute to the citizen science project? Data sources for investigating these questions include students' interaction data with the app logged behind the scenes and the images they have taken, as well as results based on traditional assessments from a small number of participants. Throughout the project, staff will widely disseminate project products and findings through the Internet, science fairs, conferences, publications, and partner networks. An eight-member Advisory Board consisting of cleantech experts, science educators, and educational researchers will oversee and evaluate this project.
The project team is developing and testing a prototype of a computer science game-based intervention intended for Grade 1 students. The prototype will include physical robots that will be designed and controlled on a game board by students through a blue-tooth enabled smartphone app. The product will include teacher resources and suggestions to facilitate classroom integration. In the Phase I pilot research with 5 classrooms and 150 students, the researchers will examine whether the prototype functions as planned, if teachers are able to implement it with small groups of students, and whether
This article examines certain guiding tenets of science journalism in the era of big data by focusing on its engagement with citizen science. Having placed citizen science in historical context, it highlights early interventions intended to help establish the basis for an alternative epistemological ethos recognising the scientist as citizen and the citizen as scientist. Next, the article assesses further implications for science journalism by examining the challenges posed by big data in the realm of citizen science. Pertinent issues include potential risks associated with data quality
SciGirls Strategies is a National Science Foundation–funded project led by Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in partnership with St. Catherine University, the National Girls Collaborative, and XSci (The Experiential Science Education Research Collaborative) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning. This three-year initiative aims to increase the number of high school girls recruited to and retained in fields where females are traditionally underrepresented: technical science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) pathways. We seek to accomplish this goal by providing career and
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Rita KarlBradley McLainAlicia Santiago
This is an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research supporting research in Smart and Connected Communities. The research supported by the award is collaborative with research at the University of Colorado. The researchers are studying the use of technologies to enable communities to connect youth and youth organizations to effectively support diverse learning pathways for all students. These communities, the youth, the youth organizations, formal and informal education organizations, and civic organizations form a learning ecology. The DePaul University researchers will design and implement a smart community infrastructure in the City of Chicago to track real-time student participation in community STEM activities and to develop mobile applications for both students and adults. The smart community infrastructure will bring together information from a variety of sources that affect students' participation in community activities. These include geographic information (e.g., where the student lives, where the activities take place, the student transportation options, the school the student attends), student related information (e.g., the education and experience background of the student, the economic status of the student, students' schedules), and activity information (e.g., location of activity, requirements for participation). The University of Colorado researchers will take the lead on analyzing these data in terms of a community learning ecologies framework and will explore computational approaches (i.e., recommender systems, visualizations of learning opportunities) to improve youth exploration and uptake of interests and programs. These smart technologies are then used to reduce the friction in the learning connection infrastructure (called L3 for informal, formal, and virtual learning) to enable the student to access opportunities for participation in STEM activities that are most feasible and most appropriate for the student. Such a flexible computational approach is needed to support the necessary diversity of potential recommendations: new interests for youth to explore; specific programs based on interests, friends' activities, or geographic accessibility; or programs needed to "level-up" (develop deeper skills) and complete skills to enhance youths' learning portfolios. Although this information was always available, it was never integrated so it could be used to serve the community of both learners and the providers and to provide measurable student learning and participation outcomes. The learning ecologies theoretical framework and supporting computational methods are a contribution to the state of the art in studying afterschool learning opportunities. While the concept of learning ecologies is not new, to date, no one has offered such a systematic and theoretically-grounded portfolio of measures for characterizing the health and resilience of STEM learning ecologies at multiple scales. The theoretical frameworks and concepts draw together multiple research and application domains: computer science, sociology of education, complexity science, and urban planning. The L3 Connects infrastructure itself represents an unprecedented opportunities for conducting "living lab" experiments to improve stakeholder experience of linking providers to a single network and linking youth to more expanded and varied opportunities. The University of Colorado team will employ three methods: mapping, modeling, and linking youth to STEM learning opportunities in school and out of school settings in a large urban city (Chicago). The recommender system will be embedded into youth and parent facing mobile apps, enabling the team to characterize the degree to which content-based, collaborative filtering, or constraint based recommendations influence youth actions. The project will result in two measurable outcomes of importance to key L3 stakeholder groups: a 10% increase in the number of providers (programs that are part of the infrastructure) in target neighborhoods and a 20% increase in the number of youth participating in programs.