Research shows that the main motivation of people who come to zoos is to have quality time with their families. At the Cincinnati Zoo, we have placed a strategic focus on becoming more visitor-focused, with a commitment to better understanding their needs in a free-choice learning environment. This includes tailoring interpretive exhibits to engage families, our primary audience. Made possible with funding from a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, we underwent a two-year process of research, development and design, and evaluation to re-interpret the award-winning Jungle Trails exhibit with a focus on active family engagement. In Jungle Trails, guests journey along a path that winds through nearly two acres of jungle-type landscape, featuring African and Asian primates, including Sumatran orangutans, gibbons, and bonobos. The exhibit appeals to visitors' emotions and motivations through an innate connection we all have with our closest animal relatives. As they learn how primates survive in the jungle, new interpretive signage and family interactives encourage guests to wonder what it would be like if their family lived in the forest. Interactives present group challenges that our non-human primate relatives face every day. Together with their troop, guests use sticks to push a stone through a maze, test their memories to find fruit in a matching game, bang out a troop rhythm on a buttress root, and compete to see who is best at tying shoes without using their thumbs. They also try out more physical skills such as swinging across bars like a gibbon and balancing like a lemur on a mini-ropes course. Colorful and playful signage introduces guests to the animals from the first-person perspective of the animal and includes questions to prompt discussion of how the animal's life compares to their own. Interactive iPad kiosks at the orangutan, gibbon and bonobo exhibits allow them to engage deeper. Guests may choose to watch videos on taking care of the animals, read about the individual animals' personalities, learn how they can help save the species or build a super primate of their own. By the time families reach the end of the trail, they have participated in activities together that have brought them closer to their primate relatives, human and non-human. Evaluation found that families engage with the interactives as intended. When asked how they would describe Jungle Trails to a friend, the word most commonly used by guests was "fun", followed by those that indicate it was "interactive" and "educational". Once overlooked and often missed by guests, Jungle Trails is now a destination exhibit as summed up by a regular Zoo guest who noted: "I got bored with Jungle Trails. Now looking forward to coming again!" Jungle Trails received an Excellence in Exhibition Special Distinction, Exemplary Model of Creating Experiences for Social Engagement, from the American Association of Museums in 2014.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington DC. It describes the CLUES project that provides STEM education opportunities to families.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
New Jersey Academy for Aquatic SciencesBarbara Kelly
This project entails the creation of a coordinated colony of robotic bees, RoboBees. Research topics are split between the body, brain, and colony. Each of these research areas is drawn together by the challenges of recreating various functionalities of natural bees. One such example is pollination: Bees coordinate to interact with complex natural systems by using a diversity of sensors, a hierarchy of task delegation, unique communication, and an effective flapping-wing propulsion system. Pollination and other agricultural tasks will serve as challenge thrusts throughout the life of this project. Such tasks require expertise across a broad spectrum of scientific topics. The research team includes experts in biology, computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, and materials science, assembled to address fundamental challenges in developing RoboBees. An integral part of this program is the development of a museum exhibit, in partnership with the Museum of Science, Boston, which will explore the life of a bee and the technologies required to create RoboBees.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert WoodRadhika NagpalJ. Gregory MorrisettGu-Yeon WeiJoseph Ayers
This research was conducted to inform the planning process for a new jellies exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The main issues investigated were: (1) Are visitors interested in interpretive information about jellies or is it only important to have an esthetically attractive exhibit?; (2) What esthetic features are most appealing?; and (3) What kinds of information and ways of presenting information are most enticing to visitors? A sample of 195 aquarium visitors was interviewed upon leaving The Outer Bay, after seeing the current jellies exhibits in the Jellies-Drifters Gallery (everyone
Relatively little is known about how Natural History Museums (NHMs) and schools can complement one another to maximize learning among school-age learners. Nor do we fully understand the long-term benefits to learning and engagement with science that NHMs have. In this Science Learning+ project researchers in UK and US universities will work with practitioners in NHMs and school teachers in the UK and the US to address these questions. The project will (a) undertake a critical review of the published and grey literature to examine the contributions to learning and engagement that NHMs have made; (b) develop improved instruments that are common across schools, NHMs and other out-of-school settings to determine the efficacy of learning experiences; devise protocols to explore the possibility of data obtained from museum evaluations being matched with national databases, thus improving our understanding of the consequences of such experiences; (c) map the areas of science curricula (using the latest version of the science National Curriculum in England and the Common Core Standards in the US) that NHMs might most valuably address; d) through researcher-practitioner collaboration review current pedagogical approaches employed by schools and NHMs, with a view to developing and studying new practice models in Phase 2. The project will devise validated instruments (of the sort that are increasingly used in large-scale social psychology studies) and explore whether data obtained from museum visitors can be matched, both in the UK and in the US, onto external datasets (e.g. the National Pupil Database in the UK; Elementary/Secondary Information System in the US).
This design case explores the affordances of gigapixel image technology for science communication and learning in museum settings through the iterative development of an explorable image viewer to engage visitors in an archaeological exhibit. We reflect on the series of user studies, prototype iterations, and design decisions taken to optimize navigation, annotation and exploration in this zoomable user interface. We highlight a set of design precedents, interaction frameworks, and content structuring approaches, while detailing the development of a media rich digital annotation strategy to
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded funding to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon to support a “Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences” (CRPA) project titled ResearchLink: Spotlight on Solar Technologies. The primary goals of CRPA projects are to communicate to the public about specific NSF research projects. This ResearchLink project promoted public awareness of two NSF-funded projects led by Dr. Carl Wamser at PSU, Integrating Green Roofs and Photovoltaic Arrays for Energy Management and Optimization of
In order to assess the impact of the exhibition Cells: The Universe Inside Us at the Maryland Science Center an exit questionnaire was administered to museum visitors who had not seen the exhibition as well as those who had seen it. One hundred forty-nine visitors were interviewed between August 7, 2009 and August 19, 2009. Fifty-one visitors were interviewed before they had seen the Cells exhibit (pre-test); ninety-eight people were interviewed after viewing the exhibit (post-test). The following analysis compares what people know about cells before and after seeing the Cells exhibit.
Research in experimental and developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, suggests that tool fluency depends on the merging of perceptual and motor aspects of its use, an achievement we call perceptuomotor integration. We investigate the development of perceptuomotor integration and its role in mathematical thinking and learning. Just as expertise in playing a piano relies on the interanimation of finger movements and perceived sounds, we argue that mathematical expertise involves the systematic interpenetration of perceptual and motor aspects of playing mathematical
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ricardo NemirovskyMolly KeltonBohdan Rhodehamel
Knight-Williams collaborated with five aquaria to solicit the reactions of a random sample of their aquaria members to the PBS broadcast of the Shape of Life series. The collaborating aquaria were located in geographically diverse regions of the country and included: The Seattle Aquarium, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Shedd Aquarium, and New York Aquarium. The report focuses on questionnaire data provided by both the non-viewer respondents and by viewers of two or more episodes from the series.
This report presents the findings from a summative evaluation of the NSF-funded Wild Music traveling exhibition conducted by Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A), for the Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The evaluation documents the exhibition’s impact and effectiveness using timing and tracking observations and onsite exit interviews. Data were collected at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) in July and August 2007 and at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum (PNNM) in March and April 2008.
The ethnography presented by van Eijck and Roth focuses on the activities of people involved in a government funded internship program in conservation and restoration, which was offered by a 'multidisciplinary research center' through a local First Nation adult education center. The internship was designed, in partnership with a local non-profit conservation society (OceanHealth), to appeal to First Nation men and women considering career change, returning to school, or re-entering the work place. The primary aim of the internship was to 'provide authentic science for diverse student