The Pratt Museum will design and fabricate exhibits in its new museum facility in Homer, Alaska. This region is home to culturally diverse coastal communities which make their living predominantly from the sea. The exhibits will awaken a sense of connectedness between people and place and provide a variety of avenues for visitors to experience the stories of the Kachemak Bay region of South Central Alaska. The overall objectives of the exhibition are to present a personal perspective, a sense of place, and a responsibility to self and community. A balance of presentation will accomplish these goals. This grant will help fund: 1) workshops for the staff planning team, evaluator, and the design team, 2) design of the exhibition, 3) fabrication and installation in the Museum’s Main Gallery and adjacent spaces, and 4) gallery guides for selected themes.
From May 16 through October 26, 2015, The New York Botanical Garden will present the first solo exhibition on Frida Kahlo to be mounted in New York City in more than 25 years. This institution-wide exhibition aims to uncover new motivations for Kahlo’s work by focusing attention on the importance of plants and nature in both her painting and her life. As one of the world’s premier botanical gardens, NYBG is uniquely qualified to present the first exhibition to focus on Kahlo’s engagement with nature, revealing her intense interest, aesthetic appreciation, and deep knowledge of the natural world, especially Mexico’s plant life.
For over 200 years, American women have contributed to paleontology and our understanding of the history of life. These contributions have never received the wide recognition of those made by men. Women's paleontological work was frequently unpublished or published without adequate acknowledgment. Tracing the contributions and experiences of women in paleontology, from a long-term historical perspective, will provide fascinating insights and an inspiring perspective on women in science seldom presented to the public. The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) is uniquely positioned to share these untold stories in the form of a new traveling exhibition with associated programming, website, and book. In this planning project PRI will work with interpretive planners, evaluation consultants, historians, scientists, and museum educators to interview intended audiences, develop content, research artifacts and specimens, plan public programs, and begin preliminary exhibition design.
This project will design an ambitious multi-partner, multi-format, multi-venue project focused on the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. The project combines experienced co-directors and leading borderland scholars with more than a dozen Historical and Cultural Organizations (HCOs) in small and mid-sized communities to explore and interpret the unique cultures, history, and physical landscapes of the region. The project aims to foster historical perspectives on the international border, cross-cultural understanding, and a deeper sense of place among the region’s residents and visitors. A suite of interrelated physical and digital products will elaborate five themes: the border through time; bridging cultures across borders; nature and history—ties that bind; shared identity amid social diversity; and a storied landscape. Formats include an interpretive website and digital archive; a traveling exhibit co-hosted/produced with our HCO partners; and community sponsored public programs.
The Anchorage Museum, in partnership with the Washington State Historical Society and Cook Inlet Historical Society, will fabricate, and present a 7,500-square-foot exhibition on James Cook’s Third Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, titled Arctic Ambitions: Captain Cook and the Northwest Passage. The exhibition will open March 27, 2015 in Anchorage and run until September 11, at which time it will travel to the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. The exhibition will be part of the Municipality of Anchorage’s Centennial Celebration. Although Cook spent time in southern seas en route to America, the prime focus of the exhibition will be the Northwest Coast, mainland Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Sea, Siberia, Kamchatka, and the Arctic Ocean.
Museums are increasingly engaging with their communities in understanding and addressing the complex questions of our society. How is this effort manifested in museum practice, and what is the impact of this work? Our study attempted to explore the boundaries of these questions by reviewing and synthesizing reports on InformalScience.org. The work was part of the NSF-funded Building Informal Science Education project (BISE). We selected a small set of reports of projects that aligned with our definition of social issues as conditions that are harmful to society, complex and characterized by a
Bang, Warren, Rosebery, and Medin explore empirical work with students from non-dominant communities to support teaching science as a practice of inquiry and understanding, not as a “settled” set of ideas and skills to learn.
In informal learning environments such as museums and science centers, researchers sometimes assess the effect of learners’ experiences by looking at their engagement. In this paper, researchers Barriault and Pearson describe a framework that identifies three different levels of visitor engagement with exhibits in a science center: initiation, transition, and breakthrough.
Educational researchers, scholars, theoreticians, and practitioners define, interpret, and study out-of school science education in various ways. Some use the term informal, while others prefer free-choice, outdoor education, everyday learning or lifelong learning. Preferences reflect theory, settings and practice, but regardless of the terminology, all researchers who are engaged in learning that occurs outside of schools are convinced that a wide range of environments—structured and unstructured—afford various types of engagement and learning. Learning science in such environments has
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.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert WoodRadhika NagpalJ. Gregory MorrisettGu-Yeon WeiJoseph Ayers
In 2013 and 2014, the Museum of Science (MOS) partnered with Dr. Rob Wood’s lab at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to create an exhibition about Wood’s Robotic Bees (RoboBees) project. The Microrobotics Takes Flight exhibition (referred to in the original grant as the RoboBees exhibition) consists of three interactive components and an introductory section. The three interactive components are modeled on the three different engineering teams working on the RoboBees project: the Brain, the Body, and the Colony teams. The purpose of the evaluation was
Young people's participation in informal STEM learning activities can contribute to their academic and career achievements, but these connections are infrequently explicitly recognized or cultivated. More systemic approaches to STEM education could allow for students' experiences of formal and informal STEM learning to be aligned, coordinated, and supported across learning contexts. This Science Learning+ planning project brings together stakeholders in two digital badge systems--one in the US and one in the UK--to plan for a study to identify the specific structural features of the systems that may allow for the alignment of learning objectives across institutions. Digital badge systems may offer an inventive solution to the challenge of connecting and building on youth's STEM-related experiences in multiple learning contexts. When part of a defined system, badges could be used to represent and communicate evidence of individual learning, as well as provide youth and educators with evidence-supported indicators for other activities in the system that might be interesting or valuable. Properly designed and supported badge systems could transmit critical information within a network of informal STEM programs and schools that (1) recognize context-dependent, interest-driven learning and (2) provide opportunities to explore those interests across multiple settings. This project advances the field of informal STEM learning in two ways. First, the project documents and analyzes the processes by which two small groups of informal science education organizations and schools negotiate the meaning and value of badges, as proxies for learning objectives, and how they decide to recognize badges awarded by other institutions. This process builds capacity within the target systems while also beginning to identify the institutional, cultural, and material capacity issues that facilitate or constrain the alignment process. Second, the project conducts a pilot study with a small number of youth in the US and UK to investigate factors associated with an individual youth's likelihood of: a) identifying badges of interest; b) connecting the activities of various badge systems to each other and to non-badging institutions, such as school or industry; c) determining which badges to pursue; and d) persisting in a particular badge pathway. Findings from this pilot study will help identify institution- and individual-level factors that might be associated with advancing student interest and progression in STEM fields. Deepening and validating the understanding of those factors and their relative impact on student experiences and outcomes will be the focus of investigations in future studies.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
James DiamondNew York City Hive Learning NetworkMOUSEDigitalMeKatherine McMillan