The Extreme Plants Traveling Sideshow is a theatre piece performed at the Natural History Museum of Utah in relation to the special exhibition, The Power of Poison. While NHMU has a history of Museum Theatre performances, this was the first to be performed since its move to the Rio Tinto Center.
The goal of this evaluation was to understand the visitor experience with museum theater and museum theatre’s value in communicating science content, as well as to inform future productions at NHMU. With this in mind, we sought answer the following questions:
1. Did guests feel the performance
Be a 4-H Scientist! Materials in a Green, Clean World is an inquiry-based science curriculum focusing on concepts of materials; plastics; reuse, recycle, and reduce; and the work of scientists and engineers. It is designed to build foundational skills of science and engineering: observation, asking questions, sorting and classifying, and communicating. The curriculum contains six learning modules intended for delivery in out-of-school time facilitated by an educator (trained volunteers or program staff). Most modules also include a “Science At Home” activity which parents/other adults and children can do at home.
Portal to the Public (PoP) has been operated with considerable funding from the National Science Foundation since 2007 under the leadership of Pacific Science Center (PSC). The program uses a particular model to train and support science-based professionals (“scientists”) in outreach and engagement activities, based on the premise that scientists should engage directly and through materials-rich hands-on activities with family audiences, based on a basic understanding on how people learn, and how to engage audiences in discovery-based learning. Furthermore, the model assumes that scientists
Supported by the National Science Foundation, the Global Soundscapes! Big Data, Big Screens, Open Ears project employs a variety of informal learning experiences to present the physics of sound and the new science of soundscape ecology. The interdisciplinary science analyzes sounds over time in different ecosystems around the world. The major components of the Global Soundscapes project are an educator-led interactive giant-screen theater program and hands-on group activities. Multimedia Research, an independent evaluation firm, implemented a summative evaluation with low income, inner-city
This report introduces a framework to support learning in library and museum makerspaces. The framework demonstrates how we can create the conditions for ambitious learning experiences to unfold within the making experience.
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Children's Museum of PittsburghInstitute of Museum and Library ServicesPeter Wardrip
A three day TTT session was held in May 2015 at Twin Cities PBS in St. Paul, MN to train nine representatives from NGCP State Collaboratives in the SciGirls Seven and Citizen SciGirls project materials (episodes, activities). NGCP chose the nine leaders (from nine states) through an application process specifically targeting regions who had not previously received training on SciGirls research-based strategies. These trainers were then expected to hold two training sessions with up to 30 educators at each session between fall of 2015 and fall of 2016. Fourteen sessions were held reaching
In prior research and development, the project team developed PocketLab, a set of web-based hands-on science simulations for middle school classrooms. With this Phase I funding, the team will develop and test a prototype of CloudLab, a classroom management platform to extend the functionality of PocketLab. The prototype will include a portal so that a class of students can collaborate on experiments, a lab notebook to analyze experimental data with graphing tools, and a teacher dashboard to monitor student progress in real time. In the Phase I pilot research, with six middle school teachers and 150 students, the project team will examine whether the prototype functions as planned, whether teachers are able to integrate it within the classroom environment, and whether students are engaged while using the prototype.
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
Computational social science represents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of reality based on advanced computer tools. From economics to political science, from journalism to sociology, digital approaches and techniques for the analysis and management of large quantities of data have now been adopted in several disciplines. The papers in this JCOM commentary focus on the use of such approaches and techniques in the research on science communication. As the papers point out, the most significant advantages of a computational approach in this sector include the chance to open up a range
Research in the field of science communication started emerging about 50 years ago and has since then matured as a field of academic enquiry. Early findings about research-active authors and countries reveal that scholarly activity in the field has traditionally been dominated by male authors from English-speaking countries in the West. The current study is a systematic, bibliographic analysis of a full sample of research papers that were published in the three most prominent journals in the field from 1979 to 2016. The findings reveal that early inequities remain prevalent, but also that
There is a gap between the discipline of economics and the public it is supposedly about and for. This gap is reminiscent of the divide that led to movements for the public understanding of and public engagement with the natural sciences. It is a gap in knowledge, trust, and opinions, but most of all it is a gap in engagement. In this paper we ask: What do we need to think about — and what do we need to do — in order to bring economics and its public into closer dialogue? At stake is engaged, critical democracy. We turn to the fields of public understanding of science and science studies for