The Exploratorium explainer program is not only important to the young people involved, but is an integral part of the museum culture. This initiative that started to help the youth of our community has blossomed into a program that has been very helpful to the science centre. In fact, the institution would not be complete without the fresh energy of the explainers. They help the Exploratorium to continue to give the real pear to its public.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This project develops and researches the integration of Peg + Cat (an animated, math-based PBS television series for preschoolers), accompanying digital media, and early childhood educator professional development (PD). PD is designed to enhance educators’ abilities to support preschoolers’ social-emotional learning in the context of math activities, and in turn, their interest and engagement in math. The project also includes recommendations for engaging
Moving Beyond Earth Programming: “STEM in 30” Webcasts. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) will develop nine “STEM in 30” webcasts which will be made available to teachers and students in grades 5-8 classrooms across the country. The primary goal of this program is to increase interest and engagement in STEM for students. Formative and summative evaluations will assess the outcomes for the program, which include the following:
Increased interest in STEM and STEM careers, Increased understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), Increased awareness and importance of current and future human space exploration, and Increased learning in the content areas.
This series of live 30-minute webcasts from the National Air and Space Museum and partner sites focus on STEM subjects that integrate all four areas. The webcasts will feature NASA and NASM curators, scientists, and educators exploring STEM subjects using museum and NASA collections, galleries, and activities. During the 30-minute broadcasts, students will engage with museum experts through experiments and activities, ask the experts questions, and answer interactive poll questions. After the live broadcasts, NASM will also archive the webcasts in an interactive “STEM in 30” Gallery.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. Using STEM America (USA) is a two-year Pathways project designed to examine the feasibility of using informal STEM learning opportunities to improve science literacy among English Language Learner (ELL) students in Imperial County, California.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes the first year partnership to design and implement a social networking platform and digital badges with two science center programs.
The NASA Science Research Mentoring Program (NASA SRMP) is an established mentoring program that presents the wonders of space exploration and planetary sciences to underserved high school students from New York City through cutting-edge, research-based courses and authentic research opportunities, using the rich resources of the American Museum of Natural History. NASA SRMP consists of a year of Earth and Planetary Science (EPS) and Astrophysics electives offered through the Museum’s After School Program, year-long mentorship placements with Museum research scientists, and summer programming through our education partners at City College of New York and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The primary goals of the project are: 1) to motivate and prepare high school students, especially those underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, to pursue STEM careers related to EPS and astrophysics; 2) to develop a model and strategies that can enrich the informal education field; and 3) to engage research scientists in education and outreach programs. The program features five in-depth elective courses, offered twice per year (for a total of 250 student slots per year). Students pursue these preparatory courses during the 10th or 11th grade, and a select number of those who successfully complete three of the courses are chosen the next year to conduct research with a Museum scientist. In addition to providing courses and mentoring placements, the program has produced curricula for the elective courses, an interactive student and instructor website for each course, and teacher and mentor training outlines.
Using STEM America (USA) is a two-year Pathways project designed to examine the feasibility of using informal STEM learning opportunities to improve science literacy among English Language Learner (ELL) students in Imperial County, California. Project partners include the Rueben H. Fleet Science Center and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The project's goals are to support teachers in the development of informal science education opportunities for English learners, partner with students in grades 7-12 to create activities and exhibits, deliver student-produced products to community members, and sustain and disseminate the activities through the development of web-based teacher tools. The teachers will work with informal science education experts, STEM professionals, and undergraduate students to develop and implement the program lessons with their 7-12 grade students. The activities and exhibits designed for community audiences will be used in the Imperial Valley Discovery Zone, slated for completion in fall 2013. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding English scientific word frames and science content specific vocabulary to help ELL students express complex scientific concepts in English. The project deliverables in this pilot project include a comprehensive teacher professional development strategy, student-developed informal science activities and exhibits, a project website, and multiple teacher resources (lesson plans, how-to guides, training materials, and social networking tools). Teachers will receive 45 hours of professional development during the summer with an additional 20 hours of support provided during the school year. UCSD's Jacob's School of Engineering will provide training on solar energy micro-grids using a micro-grid observatory to be located in Imperial Valley. English language development training will be provided by the University of California's Professional Development Institute (UCPDI) and address the role of language objectives in scientific conceptual knowledge and language development; using science and language to improve classroom questioning/discussion; and teaching academic language to English learners. The informal science education component of the training provided by the Fleet Science Center will address topics such as questioning strategies, scientific reasoning frameworks, communicating science to public audiences, and learning "high level" science content using hands-on approaches. The project design builds on research which supports an active learning approach that mirrors scientific practice and is one of the strengths of informal science learning environments. The question to be addressed by the USA Project is: "Can informal STEM activities with embedded English Language development strategies assist English learner students to increase their English language competency and their interest in STEM subjects?" The PI seeks to identify the impact that teachers have on guiding students in inquiry-based informal STEM education, evaluate the academic outcomes for students, and measure changes in community interest, understanding, and attitudes towards STEM and STEM occupations. The USA Project is designed to reach approximately 200 underserved students and will promote the participation of at least 400 additional students, parents, and other rural community members. It is anticipated that this project will result in the development of a model for teacher-led informal STEM education, increased STEM learning opportunities for the community, and the development of a network of educational institutions that helps to bridge formal and informal STEM learning and learning environments.
This report is the result of a project to investigate through a sociocultural lens whether girls-only, informal STEM experiences have potential long-term influences on young women's lives, both in terms of STEM but also more generally. The authors documented young women's perceptions of their program experiences and the ways in which they influenced their future choices in education, careers, leisure pursuits, and ways of thinking about what science is and who does it. This report includes the questionnaire used in the study.
This collaborative project aims to establish a national computational resource to move the research community much closer to the realization of the goal of the Tree of Life initiative, namely, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of all organisms. This goal is the computational Grand Challenge of evolutionary biology. Current methods are limited to problems several orders of magnitude smaller, and they fail to provide sufficient accuracy at the high end of their range. The planned resource will be designed as an incubator to promote the development of new ideas for this enormously challenging computational task; it will create a forum for experimentalists, computational biologists, and computer scientists to share data, compare methods, and analyze results, thereby speeding up tool development while also sustaining current biological research projects. The resource will be composed of a large computational platform, a collection of interoperable high-performance software for phylogenetic analysis, and a large database of datasets, both real and simulated, and their analyses; it will be accessible through any Web browser by developers, researchers, and educators. The software, freely available in source form, will be usable on scales varying from laptops to high-performance, Grid-enabled, compute engines such as this project's platform, and will be packaged to be compatible with current popular tools. In order to build this resource, this collaborative project will support research programs in phyloinformatics (databases to store multilevel data with detailed annotations and to support complex, tree-oriented queries), in optimization algorithms, Bayesian inference, and symbolic manipulation for phylogeny reconstruction, and in simulation of branching evolution at the genomic level, all within the context of a virtual collaborative center. Biology, and phylogeny in particular, have been almost completely redefined by modern information technology, both in terms of data acquisition and in terms of analysis. Phylogeneticists have formulated specific models and questions that can now be addressed using recent advances in database technology and optimization algorithms. The time is thus exactly right for a close collaboration of biologists and computer scientists to address the IT issues in phylogenetics, many of which call for novel approaches, due to a combination of combinatorial difficulty and overall scale. The project research team includes computer scientists working in databases, algorithm design, algorithm engineering, and high-performance computing, evolutionary biologists and systematists, bioinformaticians, and biostatisticians, with a history of successful collaboration and a record of fundamental contributions, to provide the required breadth and depth. This project will bring together researchers from many areas and foster new types of collaborations and new styles of research in computational biology; moreover, the interaction of algorithms, databases, modeling, and biology will give new impetus and new directions in each area. It will help create the computational infrastructure that the research community will use over the next decades, as more whole genomes are sequenced and enough data are collected to attempt the inference of the Tree of Life. The project will help evolutionary biologists understand the mechanisms of evolution, the relationships among evolution, structure, and function of biomolecules, and a host of other research problems in biology, eventually leading to major progress in ecology, pharmaceutics, forensics, and security. The project will publicize evolution, genomics, and bioinformatics through informal education programs at museum partners of the collaborating institutions. It also will motivate high-school students and college undergraduates to pursue careers in bioinformatics. The project provides an extraordinary opportunity to train students, both undergraduate and graduate, as well as postdoctoral researchers, in one of the most exciting interdisciplinary areas in science. The collaborating institutions serve a large number of underrepresented groups and are committed to increasing their participation in research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tandy WarnowDavid HillisLauren MeyersDaniel MirankerWarren Hunt, Jr.
WNET planned an initiative to involve museums in the outreach associated with Season V of Cyberchase. A written feedback survey gathered information from 32 museums as to their current practices and recommendations with respect to museum kits, discovery carts, discovery boxes, video screenings and educational computer games. The goal of the survey was to assess the needs of the museums and to guide the development of an outreach plan for Season V. Cyberchase is the Emmy Award-winning mathematics series and website on PBS KIDS GO! using broadcast, web, new media and educational outreach to
Research Questions: (1) To what extent do children's and parent's interest in math and science increase as a result of exposure to one or more of the project's components? (2) To what extent do children and parents want to engage further with Mateo y Cientina after initial exposure to the cartoon through one or more of the project's components? (3) To what extent do parents and children think they've learned new concepts about math and science as a result of completing a Mateo y Cientina activity? (4) To what extent do parents and children gain confidence in their understanding of math and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah MushlinUniversity of CaliforniaColleen Kuusinen
SciGirls is a multimedia project designed to encourage and empower more girls to pursue careers in STEM. It is a bold and unique experiment--the first television series on PBS designed specifically for girls aged 8-13. The approach is based on the findings of prior gender research. The television show and the Web site are integrally linked. Episodes are available for distribution on many of the newest digital platforms, e.g., Vimeo and iTunes for downloads, free of charge. SciGirls launched in February 2010 and reaches over 80% of the country. This project will support further research and development to advance SciGirls' online and outreach activities. Specifically, the deliverables include: (1) enhancement of the SciGirls website on pbs.org; (2) maintenance of the SciGirls Educator Networks and outreach to new partners; and (3) R&D on other media platforms. The project's two strategic partners are the National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) in Seattle and The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The NGCP links SciGirls with its network of 500 community-based science programs for girls, and The Franklin Institute coordinates an affiliate network of science museums to implement SciGirls' outreach activities. The project will also work with the Girl Scouts of America's new "Girl Scout Leadership Experience" program, which emphasizes STEM learning. The most significant web component is a social networking feature that allows girls who are interested in science to connect with peers across the nation. To date, there have been over 300,000 unique visitors and 20,000 registered "SciGirls."