This paper examines the changing roles of public libraries in their communities especially the impact that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs are having on how libraries perceive their evolving mission. Survey results will be presented that show an overwhelming interest by librarians and their libraries in hosting STEM exhibitions and programs. Several successful STEM library programs will illustrate the diversity of approaches that have been implemented including the NSF-funded STAR Library Education Network project (STAR_NET).
The public library as a venue for learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is seen as having great potential for implementing informal STEM education. There are 17,000 public library locations in all 50 states; at that scale they can provide citizens in each community opportunities to engage in lifelong STEM learning. With such broad reach at a local level, public libraries are an exciting prospect for engaging the Nation in STEM learning. Broadly, the question that this paper seeks to address is, in what ways do libraries support the development of STEM learning? To
Many libraries are now providing innovative science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities in their youth programs, including interactive exhibitions and hands-on workshops. What started some years ago as independent experiments has become a national movement. More and more libraries are responding to the need to increase science literacy and support 21st Century skills, such as critical thinking, by adding to STEM programs for patrons of all ages, from pre-school to adults. With the introduction of STEM into the library’s traditional programming, librarians need to evaluate the
Who We Are: A network of informal educators, climate scientists, learning scientists and local partners across four cities, dedicated to improving local understanding of and engagement with climate change science. Mission: CUSP aims to foster a network of climate-focused organizations to implement targeted, coordinated, and concentrated educational strategies that explore local climate impacts and community-level responses. What We Do: Unite local organizations committed to addressing the impacts of climate change into collaborative network Use latest climate science and learning science research to inform program development Connect urban residents’ personal interests to larger city systems impacted by climate change, and provide residents opportunities to explore city-wide responses Deliver programs that are targeted (aimed at specific audiences), coordinated (presenting consistent and clear information about the science of climate change), and concentrated (delivered many times, through many programs) Test the hypothesis that when people encounter the same science content in multiple settings, from multiple points of view, they are more likely to understand and remember important concepts What We Offer: A Community of Practice for local organizations, including training on best practices of climate communication and education Provide local organizations with current climate science impacting their city, and latest learning science research Opportunities for city residents to explore local impacts of climate change in every day settings, at neighborhood centers, at schools, online, and at city festivals. Opportunities for city residents to engage with local organizations in community-level responses to climate change
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TEAM MEMBERS:
The Franklin InstituteRaluca EllisFrederic BertleySteven SnyderRadley HortonKevin Crowley
The Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit (CaSTL)’s outreach program in collaboration with the California Science Project at Irvine (CSPI), housed at the Center for Educational Partnerships at UC Irvine designed, created, implemented, and consistently refined a science program for 8-12 year old students at the Boys and Girls Club(BGC) in Santa Ana, California. The year-long weekly program and 4-day summer camp consisted of hour-long lessons designed to connect to CaSTL’s research goals of investigation at the microscopic level. Appendix includes observation protocol, performance measure
Making Stuff Season Two is designed to build on the success of the first season of Making Stuff by expanding the series content to include a broader range of STEM topics, creating a larger outreach coalition model and a “community of practice,” and developing new outreach activities and digital resources. Specifically, this project created a national television 4-part miniseries, an educational outreach campaign, expanded digital content, promotion activities, station relations, and project evaluation. These project components help to achieve the following goals: 1. To increase public understanding that basic research leads to technological innovation; 2. To increase and sustain public awareness and excitement about innovation and its impact on society; and 3. To establish a community of practice that enhances the frequency and quality of collaboration among STEM researchers and informal educators. These goals were selected in order to address a wider societal issue, and an important element of the overall mission of NOVA: to inspire new generations of scientists, learners, and innovators. By creating novel and engaging STEM content, reaching out to new partners, and developing new outreach tools, the second season of Making Stuff is designed to reach new target audiences including underserved teens and college students crucial to building a more robust and diversified STEM workforce pipeline. Series Description: In this four-part special, technology columnist and best-selling author David Pogue takes a wild ride through the cutting-edge science that is powering a next wave of technological innovation. Pogue meets the scientists and engineers who are plunging to the bottom of the temperature scale, finding design inspiration in nature, and breaking every speed limit to make tomorrow's "stuff" "Colder," "Faster," "Safer," and "Wilder." Making Stuff Faster Ever since humans stood on two feet we have had the basic urge to go faster. But are there physical limits to how fast we can go? David Pogue wants to find out, and in "Making Stuff Faster," he’ll investigate everything from electric muscle cars and the America’s cup sailboat to bicycles that smash speed records. Along the way, he finds that speed is more than just getting us from point A to B, it's also about getting things done in less time. From boarding a 737 to pushing the speed light travels, Pogue's quest for ultimate speed limits takes him to unexpected places where he’ll come face-to-face with the final frontiers of speed. Making Stuff Wilder What happens when scientists open up nature's toolbox? In "Making Stuff Wilder," David Pogue explores bold new innovations inspired by the Earth's greatest inventor, life itself. From robotic "mules" and "cheetahs" for the military, to fabrics born out of fish slime, host David Pogue travels the globe to find the world’s wildest new inventions and technologies. It is a journey that sees today's microbes turned into tomorrow’s metallurgists, viruses building batteries, and ideas that change not just the stuff we make, but the way we make our stuff. As we develop our own new technologies, what can we learn from billions of years of nature’s research? Making Stuff Colder Cold is the new hot in this brave new world. For centuries we've fought it, shunned it, and huddled against it. Cold has always been the enemy of life, but now it may hold the key to a new generation of science and technology that will improve our lives. In "Making Stuff Colder," David Pogue explores the frontiers of cold science from saving the lives of severe trauma patients to ultracold physics, where bizarre new properties of matter are the norm and the basis of new technologies like levitating trains and quantum computers. Making Stuff Safer The world has always been a dangerous place, so how do we increase our odds of survival? In "Making Stuff Safer," David Pogue explores the cutting-edge research of scientists and engineers who want to keep us out of harm’s way. Some are countering the threat of natural disasters with new firefighting materials and safer buildings. Others are at work on technologies to thwart terrorist attacks. A next-generation vaccine will save millions from deadly disease. And innovations like smarter cars and better sports gear will reduce the risk of everyday activities. We’ll never eliminate danger—but science and technology are making stuff safer.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
WGBH Educational FoundationPaula Apsell
WaterBotics is the underwater robotics curriculum and program that is being disseminated to four regions through a National Science Foundation grant, in collaboration with national and state partners. Its goal is to provide hands-on experiences for middle and high school age youth to engineering design, information technology tools, and science concepts, and to increase awareness and interest in engineering and IT careers. The curriculum, which can be used either in traditional classroom settings or in after-school and summer-camp situations, is problem-based, requiring teams of students to work together to design, build, test, and redesign underwater robots, or “bots” made of LEGO® and other components. Students use the NXT and LEGO Mindstorms® software to program their robots to maneuver in the water, thereby gaining valuable experience with computer programming. Teams must complete a series of increasingly sophisticated challenges which culminates with a final challenge that integrates learning from the prior challenges.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Stevens Institute of TechnologyMercedes McKayPatricia Holahan
The Decapoda - shrimp, lobsters, and crabs - are an economically important, diverse group of animals whose geologic history extends back 400 million years. Living representatives, numbering over 15,000 species, are global in distribution and nearly ubiquitous in oceanic and non-oceanic environments. They exert a major impact on ecosystems; understanding the dynamics of their fossil record will illuminate their historical impact on ecosystems. We will test the hypothesis that decapods are arrayed in a series of discrete evolutionary faunas; remarkably, the vast array of living and fossil decapods in diverse interrelated groups have exploited four basic body plans repeatedly. Other hypotheses to be tested are that the Decapoda have repeatedly adopted a limited number of baupläne, or generalized architectures, throughout their history; that they have experienced explosive evolutionary radiations followed by periods of no determinable change; and that they are generally resistant to mass extinction events. These hypotheses will be tested using a unique dataset compiled and assessed by the Principle Investigators: a compilation of all fossil decapod species, arrayed in a classification scheme including fossil and living taxa, with geologic and geographic ranges of all species, including a phylogeny (i.e. "family tree") for many sub-groups within the Decapoda. The dataset will be expanded to include ecological data for each taxon and will be entered into the Paleobiology Database, an NSF-supported vehicle for analyzing the fossil record. Employing its methodology, patterns of diversity and macroevolution of the decapods will be generated at levels ranging from the entire Order to species level. This will result in a comprehensive analysis of macroevolutionary patterns of this major group for the first time. Available paleoecological data derived from field studies and published records will be used to determine the effects of various environmental factors such as seafloor conditions, reef development, water depth, and temperature on morphology, extinction survivorship, and diversity. Because decapods have a remarkable range of morphological variation preservable in the fossil record, the diversity of the groups of decapods can be assessed in relation to their morphological characteristics. Defining the history of taxa with specialized morphology will permit recognition of body plans that have been exploited by different decapod groups throughout the history of the clade.
Intellectual merit. This study will provide the most comprehensive analysis of macroevolution of the Decapoda yet conducted, all based upon a unique dataset that is internally consistent by virtue of its having been developed entirely by the investigators. It will document the significance of employing a high resolution, species-level database for interpretation of diversity. The hypotheses and conclusions derived here will provide a model and the foundation for future work on Decapoda, Arthropoda, and macroevolution of well-constrained groups. It will provide a test for the efficacy of PBDB data versus a constrained dataset assessed by specialist systematists.
Broader impacts. The work will introduce undergraduate students at Kent State at Stark, an undergraduate campus, and Kent State at Kent, to research that involves paleoecological, paleogeographical, and functional morphological elements which, in turn, will be communicated to other students. Because decapods are known to virtually everyone, they form an excellent group to use to inform the public about ancient patterns of diversity and the relationship between the morphology of organisms, variations in their environmental requirements, and their adaptability to different physical conditions. This will be conveyed in a professionally constructed display which has the potential to be exhibited in museums and universities around the country. Small kits designed for use in elementary and middle schools will be available to allow students to make their own observations about the adaptations of decapods to their environment and its effect on diversity. Published papers and presentations on results of research at meetings will be prepared throughout the course of the research. Because the study of modern biodiversity is a concern of the general public, presentations to broader audiences as well as geology classes will provide a broad historical context for understanding modern patterns of diversity. Data entered into Paleobiology Database and Ohio Data Resource Commons will be openly available to other researchers and the general public. Combined, the databases will assure archival storage and public access, following a proprietary period.
Discovering and understanding the temporal evolution of events hidden in text corpora is a complex yet critical task for knowledge discovery. Although mining event dynamics has been an important research topic leading to many successful algorithms, researchers, research and development managers, intelligence analysts and the general public are still in dire need of effective tools to explore the evolutionary trends and patterns. This exploratory project focuses on developing and validating a novel idea called narrative animation. Narrative animation uses animated visualizations to narrate, explore, and share event dynamics conveyed in temporally evolving text collections. Film art techniques are employed to leverage the animated visualizations in information organization and change detection, with the goals of enhancing analytical power and user engagement. A prototype system called CityStories is being developed to generate narrative animations of events in cities derived from web-based text. If this novel, risky research is successful, it is expected to yield fundamental results in narrative animation that can advance the current paradigm in information visualization and visual analytics by developing novel techniques in using animations for presenting and analyzing dynamic abstract data at a large scale. The pilot system CityStories system is expected provide a novel network platform for education, entertainment, and data analytics. It will engage general users such as students, teachers, journalists, bloggers, and many others in web information visualization and study. Results of this research will be disseminated through publications, the World Wide Web, and collaborations with researchers and analysts. The project web site (http://coitweb.uncc.edu/~jyang13/narrativeanimation/narrativeanimation.htm) will include research outcomes, publications, developed software, videos, and datasets for wide dissemination to public.
Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG), a Cambridge-based research firm specializing in the evaluation of educational programs, conducted the summative evaluation of StarTalk. The overall focus was to examine how well the joint presentation of science and humor reaches a public audience, including an audience not typically exposed to informal science learning, and how well it engages and informs them, such that they are motivated to continue learning more. Primary evaluation research questions included: 1. To what extent does exposure to StarTalk lead to increased interest in and knowledge of
A team from Michigan State University, in partnership with six science, art-science, and art museum venues around the country and with the assistance of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, is implementing an EAGER project to conduct ongoing experiments on the chemical precursors to life as exhibit experiences for visitors to these venues. The experiments, to be run over the course of several months as the exhibit travels around the country, expand on the 1950s' work of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, which continues to stimulate new investigations and publications, including experiments being conducted on the International Space Station. The experiments/exhibits share key features across the three different kinds of venues, allowing the team to study and compare the impacts on the various publics of engaging them in real-time science experiments. Two major goals are (1) to explore new ways to attract public interest in science by performing in public settings previously untried experiments on the chemical precursors to life, and (2) to investigate how the context of different kinds of venues and their visitor characteristics affect how visitors interpret the experience and what they learn. The team is also exploring how various data visualization representations can be designed to foster public interest and understanding. The intent is to develop an approach that has potential applications to other STEM content domains and expanding the reach to broader public audiences.
This Communicating Research to Public Audiences (CRPA) project is for promoting public understanding of and engagement with STEM by developing and implementing technology and formats for interactive exhibitions at the interface of underwater robotics and marine science. This program envisions the use of BRUCE (Bioinspired Robotic Underwater Carangiform Exhibit) featuring a shoal of ROSAs (Remotely Operated Swimming Avatars) at the River Project to engage the local New York City community and echo to the broader U.S. non-technical audience in marine science and technology. More specifically, this program is expected to put kids and adults behind the wheel of miniature robotic fish that can swim alone, school in groups, and compete against each other under the remote control of the audience. To further attract youngsters to the exhibit, an application for an iDevice, that is, an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, for controlling the robotic fish while seeing through its eyes will be developed. This is a cooperative venture between New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the River Project.