Creating Museum Media for Everyone (CMME), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Enhanced Pathways Grant, held a five-day workshop in May 2012 that brought together 55 museum professionals and accessibility experts in fields such as formal science and special education, technology product development, gaming, accessible technologies, and universal design and Universal Design for Learning. The overarching purpose was to help launch the work of the core team from the Museum of Science (MOS), the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), Ideum, and Audience Viewpoints in developing the next
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting held in Washington, DC. It discusses the second season of SciGirls, a multimedia project designed to encourage and empower more girls to pursue careers in STEM.
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Twin Cities Public TelevisionRita Karl
This two year full scale development project builds on a proof of concept EAGER award. The EAGER award resulted in web-based summaries of peer reviewed STEM education research articles for ISE professionals. The project team will make field-requested adjustments to the Relating Research to Practice (RR2P) Web Resource for ISE Professionals; implement two workshops; and produce 200 briefs and 25-30 synthesis papers. The team members will work closely with CAISE regarding selection of research papers and topics of new synthesis papers. CAISE will make available the synthesis papers during convenings, forums, and other events. RR2P will help build capacity across the ISE field by bringing research to ISE educators, administrators, and others in an accessible manner as well as involving ISE practitioners in the process of selecting topics of interest for the briefs and papers and the manner in which content is disseminated. The project deliverables have potential for building capacity across the ISE field in terms of increasing awareness and understanding of research-based discoveries and increasing effectiveness of teaching and learning.
This poster from the 2014 AISL PI Meeting presents Peg + Cat, a research and development project that explores the mechanisms that initiate and support innovation in early childhood education, especially by combining informal learning via public media and technology with teacher and family interactions to maximize children's math learning.
This poster was shared at the 2014 AISL PI meeting, August 20-22. It describes the goals and early (pre-award) work on the GrACE project. This project aims to teach computational thinking and fostering computer science attitude change among middle school students through a procedurally generated puzzle game.
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Northeastern UniversityGillian SmithCasper Harteveld
Northeastern University will design, test, and study GrACE, a procedurally generated puzzle game for teaching computer science to middle school students, in partnership with the Northeastern Center for STEM Education and the South End Technology Center. The Principal Investigators will study the effect of computer generated games on students' development of algorithmic and computational thinking skills and their change of perception about computer science through the game's gender-inclusive, minds-on, and collaborative learning environment. The teaching method has potential to significantly advance the state of the art in both game-based learning design and yield insights for gender-inclusive teaching and learning that could have broad impact on advancing the field of computer science education. Development and evaluation of GrACE will consist of two, year-long research phases, each with its own research question. The first, design and development, phase will focus on how to design a gender-inclusive, educational puzzle game that fosters algorithmic thinking and positive attitude change towards computer science. The content generator will be created using Answer Set Programming, a powerful approach that involves the declarative specification of the design space of the puzzles. The second phase will be an evaluation that studies, by means of a mixed-methods experimental design, the effectiveness of incorporating procedural content generation into an educational game, and specifically whether such a game strategy stimulates and improves minds-on, collaborative learning. Additionally, the project will explore two core issues in developing multiplayer, collaborative educational games targeted at middle school students: what typical face-to-face interactions foster collaborative learning, and what gender differences exist in how students play and learn from the game. The project will reach approximately 100 students in the Boston area, with long-term goals of reaching students worldwide, once the game has been tested with a local audience. Results of the project will yield a new educational puzzle game that can teach algorithmic thinking and effect attitude change regarding computer science. Through the process of creating a gender-inclusive game to teach computer science, it will provide guidelines for future educational game projects. Beyond these individual project deliverables, it will improve our understanding of the potential for procedural content generation to transform education, through its development of a new technique for generating game content based on supplying educational objectives.
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Northeastern UniversityGillian SmithCasper Harteveld
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It highlights the goals, audience, outcomes, and lessons learned for a pathways project to develop a model for producing scientific news reports in a variety of media formats on a range of topics of keen interest to rural and Native American communities in Montana. Cultural differences and geographic isolation influence opportunities to provide STEM content to these communities, yet these communities are facing perplexing decisions about exploitation of their environmental resources. The poster highlights the successes of
This poster from 2014 AISL PI Meeting describes a project that studies how 3-D visualizations can most effectively be used to improve public understanding of freshwater lake ecosystems and earth science processes.
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University of California, DavisGeoff Schladow
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes PEEP and the Big Wide World, a fully bilingual website (in Spanish and English) containing 120 animated stories and live-action video segments; 21 online games; 120 offline “Anywhere Science and Math” activities for families; an extensive curriculum for preschool educators; and 14 Android and iOS mobile apps for kids.
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WGBH Educational FoundationMarisa Wolsky
Research chemists from the Center for Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis (CENTC) worked collaboratively with the Liberty Science Center (LSC) to develop a hands-on activity to educate visitors about how small molecules derived from petroleum feedstocks are used to make larger molecules that are then utilized in the production of everyday consumer goods. Researchers, faculty, and students provided the chemistry content and LSC worked with Blue Telescope Studios to create a user-friendly program for the Ideum Multitouch Table. The resulting “Molecule Magic,” an engaging and intuitive
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Center for Enabling New Technology Through Catalysis (CENTC)Abby O'Connor