This report presents findings from the evaluation of the Baseball Stories user generated content (UGC) project. The Baseball Stories project was created by the Information and Interactive Technology Department to allow people to share stories about their experiences with baseball for display in the Baseball As America traveling exhibition. As a part of the project, a website was created where people could create and post their stories and view other stories, and an exhibition kiosk was created where people could view their or others' stories or send an email to remind themselves to create a
Exploring Life's Origins is a project funded by the National Science Foundation through the Discovery Corps Postdoctoral Fellowship. Janet Iwasa was the recipient of this grant, and her goals were to help the public understand research on the origins of life conducted in the labs of Dr. Jack Szostak from Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital and the Center for Origins Research by creating molecular visualizations based on the research and communicating to the public scientific research concepts related to the origins of life. The science communication portion of this project was
KQED's QUEST is a multi-year, multiple-media project seeking to influence the Bay Area's discussions about and activities related to science, the environment, and nature, with a particularly local focus. Rockman et al (REA), a San Francisco-based research and evaluation organization, conducted an evaluation of QUEST programming and activities over the course of several years. The evaluation examined general QUEST audiences, formal and informal educators' use of QUEST, and KQED's development and maintenance of a partnership among a number of Bay Area science and environmental organizations. The
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Elizabeth BandyMonnette FungKQED Northern California Public Media
Veridian inSight performed an evaluation study in fall of 2009 to evaluate the effectiveness of an online training developed as an outreach component of the FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman series (http://pbskids.org/fetch/). The FETCH! Hands-On Science Training was designed for anyone who wants to lead science activities with elementary-age kids (including after-school providers, teachers, camp counselors, librarians, museum staff, parents, and others). The goals of the evaluation study were to assess the extent to which the FETCH! training was successful at:· Preparing afterschool educators
ConCiencia News was the first Spanish-language news service in the United States focused exclusively on health, science and environmental news, providing free of cost news stories to a diverse array of Hispanic media including 100+ newspapers and magazines, top Hispanic web portals, and almost 150 Spanish-language radio stations. Each news story features original content developed by SRF journalists, and Hispanic researchers are often features to serve as role models for the public. The summative evaluation focused on two primary audiences for the Spanish-language stories: 1) the professional
Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (FWMSH) contracted with Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to evaluate CSI: The Experience National Science Foundation- and Science Museum Exhibit Collaborative-funded project focused on forensic science. The project included a museum exhibition and an online gaming experience (Web Adventure) targeting children ages 9 to 17 and adults. A summative evaluation explored visitors' overall experiences, understanding of forensic sciences, and the research question: Does the Web Adventure extend exhibition visitors' learning of forensic science? A process
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
The Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) conducted a summative evaluation of the NSF-ISE funded project, WolfQuest. WolfQuest is an educational video game, downloadable free of charge, developed by Eduweb (Educational Web Adventures, Inc.) and the Minnesota Zoo. WolfQuest intends to increase the knowledge of, interest in, and attitudes towards wolves and wolf habitats in children ages 9 to 15. This evaluation report synthesizes key analysis and findings from data based on a web survey of players, in-depth phone interviews of players, and content analysis of the game conversation forums
Zooming user interfaces are increasingly popular on mobile devices with touch screens. Swiping and pinching finger gestures anywhere on the screen manipulate the displayed portion of a page, and taps open objects within the page. This makes navigation easy but limits other manipulations of objects that would be supported naturally by the same gestures, notably cut and paste, multiple selection, and drag and drop. A popular device that suffers from this limitation is Apple’s iPhone. In this paper, we present Bezel Swipe, an interaction technique that supports multiple selection, cut, copy
Most current multi-touch capable interactive user interfaces for tabletop are built from custom toolkits that are decoupled from, and on top of, the “Desktop” provided by the underlying Operating System. However, this approach requires that each individual touch system build their own suite of touch capable custom applications (such as photo browsers), usually resulting in limited functionality. In this paper, we propose a software architecture for supporting and integrating multi-touch capability on existing desktop systems, where multi-touch and multiple single pointer input can be used
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Kelvin ChengBenjamin ItzsteinPaul SztajerMarkus Rittenbruch
This Communicating Research to Public Audiences project focuses on the Reedy Glacier Antarctic research of Brenda Hall (OPP 0229034) and its relevance to the residents of and visitors to Maine. Collaborators include the University of Maine, the Maine Discovery Museum, the Acadia National Park and Cadillac Mountain Sports (an environmentally active retail company with several stores around the state). The primary deliverable is the development of an interactive software program that presents information and experiences in a two-tiered concept approach -- on the Reedy Glacier and its connection to Maine and on the process of science. The software is being configured into kiosks at the three partnering organizations, into a DVD format for informal and formal settings to be distributed at cost and onto a University of Maine Climate Change web portal currently under separate development. The project web site will provide source code for the portal design so others may use it to create portals and modules of their own. The Maine Discovery Museum intends to create additional exhibitry on the topic with resources outside this proposal, and the Acadia National Park will use the programs in teacher education workshops.
WGBHs third season of the PBS Design Squad reality series, designed to inspire a new generation of engineers, got teenagers to think smart, build fast, and contend with a wild array of engineering challenges for real-life clients. Targeted to 9- to 12-year-olds, and fun for people of all ages, this fast-paced TV series is the fuel behind a national, multimedia initiative to attract kids to engineering. The project expaned its reach into the middle school classroom to create the first online community where kids can share their real-world engineering projects and provide a richer video viewing experience with embedded "pop-up" commentary.
The goal of this project is to extend the impact of the nationally broadcast weekly radio program, Science Friday to a new, young audience through the various new cyber-space platforms and interactive tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life as well as new emerging social networking tools. The STEM content over the course of the two year project will include a wide variety of topics in all disciplines. The relationship between art and science will also be a focus. The NPR radio broadcasts currently reach 1.3 million listeners every week, and that audience is expected to increase. In addition to that audience, this project will target a new audience of adults under the age of 35 using various cyber platforms and new social networking tools such as Second Life, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Audiences will also be reached through remote broadcasts from science centers and art centers around the country. Over 30 science centers will use this project's web content on their own web sites, reaching their audiences as well. The web content will be translated into Spanish and widely disseminated to Hispanic audiences. Each Friday afternoon, Ira Flatow, the PI will produce and host the nationally broadcast Science Friday radio program interviewing scientists and engineers in a lively engaging format. In addition, the Science Friday digital media team will be producing and inviting others to create and post digital content and commentary on the Science Friday web site for further dissemination through Second Life, Facebook, as well as other emerging networking platforms. The evaluation will use a quasi-experimental design to study the appeal of both the radio broadcasts and the cyber-platforms with both older and younger audiences. Proposed audience impacts include increased STEM knowledge, interest, and behaviors. Partner organizations include the Self Reliance Foundation, the New York Hall of Science, LA Theatreworks, and Tribeca Film Festival.