The University of California, Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES), ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), and the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) will study how 3-D visualizations can most effectively be used to improve general public understanding of freshwater lake ecosystems and Earth science processes through the use of immersive three-dimensional (3-D) visualizations of lake and watershed processes, supplemented by tabletop science activity stations. Two iconic lakes will be the focus of this study: Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, and Lake Champlain in Vermont and New York, with products readily transferable to other freshwater systems and education venues. The PI will aggregate and share knowledge about how to effectively utilize 3-D technologies and scientific data to support learning from immersive 3-D visualizations, and how other hands-on materials can be combined to most effectively support visitor learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems. The project will be structured to iteratively test, design, and implement 3-D visualizations in both concurrent and staggered development. The public will be engaged in the science behind water quality and ecosystem health; lake formation; lake foodwebs; weather and climate; and the role and impact of people on the ecosystem. A suite of publicly available learning resources will be designed and developed on freshwater ecosystems, including immersive 3-D visualizations; portable science stations with multimedia; a facilitator's guide for docent training; and a Developer's Manual to allow future informal science education venues. Project partners are organized into five teams: 1) Content Preparation and Review: prepare and author content including writing of storyboards, narratives, and activities; 2) 3-D Scientific Visualizations: create visualization products using spatial data; 3) Science Station: plan, design, and produce hands-on materials; 4) Website and Multimedia: produce a dissemination strategy for professional and public audiences; 4) Evaluation: conduct front-end, formative, and summative evaluation of both the 3-D visualizations and science activity stations. The summative evaluation will utilize a mixed methods approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and will include focus groups, semi-structured interviews, web surveys, and in-depth interviews. Leveraging 3-D tools, high-quality visual displays, hands-on activities, and multimedia resources, university-based scientists will work collaboratively with informal science education professionals to extend the project's reach and impact to an audience of 400,000 visitors, including families, youth, school field trip groups, and tourists. The project will implement, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge of how 3-D visualizations and technologies can be designed and configured to effectively support visitor engagement and learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems, and will evaluate how these technologies can be transferred more broadly to other informal science venues and schools for future career and workforce development in these critical STEM areas.
The ScienceMakers: African Americans and Scientific Innovation is a three-year project designed to increase awareness of the contributions of African American scientists, raise awareness of STEM careers, and increase understanding of STEM concepts through the creation of education, media, and career resources. The project team is supplemented with an extensive advisory board of STEM education, museum, and community professionals, as well as representatives from partnering science centers. Project partners include the St. Louis Science Center, Liberty Science Center, New York Hall of Science, Pacific Science Center, Franklin Institute, COSI Columbus, Lawrence Hall of Science, SciWorks, Detroit Science Center, and MOSI Chicago. Additional collaborators include middle and high schools with high minority populations. Project deliverables include a fully accessible multi-media archive of video oral histories of 180 African American scientists and web resources and contests utilizing Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications such as social networking tools that foster engagement and build community around the ScienceMakers. Public programs for youth and adults at science museums, after-school programs, and community organizations highlight African American contributors, and encourage interest in science and science careers and the ScienceMakers DVD Toolkit expand the reach of this innovative project. Intended impacts for youth and adults consist of increased awareness of STEM concepts and career options, exposure to African American scientists, awareness of the contributions of minority scientists, and 21st century skills. Intended impacts on professional audiences include increased awareness and understanding of STEM careers and workforce diversity, 21st century skills, and STEM career options. The project evaluation, conducted by Knight-Williams Research Communications, utilizes a mixed-methods approach. The evaluation assesses the impact of the oral history archive, public programs, and other deliverables on public and professional audiences' knowledge, interest, and awareness of the contributions of African American scientists, STEM concepts, and STEM careers. The evaluation also includes an ethnography which examines factors that contribute to success in STEM careers by African-American scientists. The ScienceMakers significantly expands the world\'s largest searchable oral history archive and may have an enduring impact on research and practice in the field of informal science education. The project has the potential to enrich programs and exhibits, while raising awareness of the contributions of African-American scientists among informal science education professionals and the general public.
The purpose of the ETOM project is to develop a "user's guide" to the present and projected energy resources of our planet and the relationship to climate change. It will prototype and evaluate new ways of providing the public with the information and online tools to make wiser choices about powering homes, schools, businesses, and communities. The project uses a hybrid model of science communication that includes video, in-person presentations, and Web 2.0 social networking. National PBS broadcasts of three hour long programs, with two new specials premiering on Earth Day 2012, will reach large audiences influencing the understanding of climate change and the potential of renewable energy in measurable ways. Events at four science centers and natural history museums located across the country will explore how increased knowledge of Earth Science through in-person presentations informs behavior. The project's social networking tools and resources will motivate and support accessible real-world activities. An online "Energy Gauge" will allows users to find rebates, explore driving and diet, and make choices that can save money and reduce carbon emissions. The core project team includes Richard Alley, chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on Abrupt Climate Change, who will host the television programs. Outreach partners include science centers across the nation and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. The project will leverage existing NSF-supported projects such as the Future Earth Initiative led by the Science Museum of Minnesota. Rockman Et Al will evaluate the project impacts working from front-end to summative stages to understand the reactions of media, online, and on-site users. Proposed project impacts include increasing participants' understanding of how the Earth's system is affected by human uses of energy and the impact of those energy uses on climate. Other impacts include changes in attitude and behavior affecting individual uses of energy. Evaluations will be conducted with TV show viewers as well as science center and website visitors using quasi-experimental, quantitative, and qualitative study designs.
The Space Science Institute, in collaboration with the Catawba Science Center (North Carolina), the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, the American Library Association, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific propose to develop a multi-pronged project on the topic of asteroids. Content areas will include: Asteroids ? Up-close and Personal; Deep Impact; and Planetary Protection. Deliverables will include a 2,500 square-foot traveling exhibit for small to mid-sized museums; four, 300 square-foot "small exhibit components" (SECs) for libraries, community centers, etc.; Web 2.0 sites for the project developers and for the public; public education programs; professional development programs for informal STEM professionals; and a study of how Web 2.0 can be used to improve the evaluation of Web sites. The project team will be experimenting with virtual prototyping of exhibit modules as a way to improve exhibit development, especially with team members who are around the country. Teens from around the country will be enlisted to help inform the project on its deliverables. The Association of Science-Technology Centers will manage the exhibit tour. The Institute for Learning Innovation will conduct the evaluation activities, including the study of Web 2.0 and virtual prototyping tasks.
This proposed Communicating Research to Public Audiences (CRPA) project outlines a pathway for communicating how climate change can affect a watershed area that supplies water for a specific region. The educational platforms will address the geology of the Caldera along with meteorology, ecology and hydrology. The project will focus on the ongoing scientific research processes and the impact of climate change to the physical system as well as to the citizens who depend on this resource. Partners in this endeavor include New Mexico EPSCOR, the University of New Mexico, the Valles Caldera National Preserve, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Santa Fe Productions and Tim Aydelott Productions. The project team will create a PBS television documentary in English and Spanish, including a Native American Jemez Pueblo storyteller who will describe the natural environment of the Caldera. The team will also create a YouTube channel with updatable clips, a Facebook fan page, and a climate change exhibit. The evaluation will include front-end and summative components, and will be conducted by Minnick & Associates and Elsa Bailey Consulting. The intended impact of this CRPA is to educate the public about the importance of the Caldera in securing the region's water supply and how climate changes could impact their lives. Further, aspects of the multidisciplinary science used in this research will be described with the goal of encouraging more young people from the region to choose STEM careers.
Soundprint Media Center, Inc. and RLPaul Productions, produced a cross-media package that includes a website (capecosmos.org), radio programs, and museum-based family events related to the 50th anniversary of the Space Program. The project, Out of This World (OOTW), is a program that sought to stimulate interest in science by presenting the little known stories of African-Americans and women who contributed to the U.S. Space program, and to provide historical context for the scope and reach of the nascent aerospace science program. Through radio documentaries and collaborations with science centers and museums, including the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), OOTW broke new ground in developing an integrated media project that reached different audiences. The deliverables included: three radio documentaries (; an educational DVD package with 20 video mini-documentaries, curator interviews with space research pioneers and a learning guide; an interactive website that recreates a space mission circa 1961, and a series of live two-way video conferences between NASM and some 14 partner museums and science centers. OOTW used the power of investigative journalism and the reach of public radio and local science museums to connect with adults and school-age children, to cut across demographic categories, and to include a significant number of minority and at-risk children.
The Louisiana State Museum and Tulane University/Xavier University Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, along with several other research collaborators, designers, evaluators, and the Times-Picayune newspaper are partnering to develop a multi-pronged approach on educating the general public, school children, teachers and public officials on the STEM-related aspects of Hurricane Katrina and its implications for the future of New Orleans and other parts of the country. The major products will be an 8,500 square-foot semi-permanent exhibit, smaller exhibits for Louisiana regional libraries, a comprehensive Web site on hurricanes, a set of studies on informal learning, a case study for public officials about the relevance of science research to policy and planning, teacher workshops, and a workshop for interested exhibit designers from around the country. This project advances the field of informal science education by exploring how museums, universities, and their communities can work together to provide meaningful learning experiences on STEM topics that are critical to solving important community and national issues.
The Science Museum of Minnesota, in collaboration with six NSF-funded Science and Technology Centers (STCs) around the country, is developing several deliverables around the theme of the Anthropocene; that is, the idea that Earth has entered a new geologic epoch in which humanity is the dominant agent of global change. Deliverables include: (1) a 3,500 square-foot exhibit with object theater at the museum; (2) an Earth Buzz Web site that focuses on global change topics equivalent in design intent to the museum's popular current science Science Buzz website; (3) kiosks with Earth Buzz experiences installed in selected public venues; (4) Public programs with decision makers and opinion leaders on the implications of a human-dominated planet; and (5) youth programs and activities that engage them with the exhibit, web site, and careers in STEM. The exhibits and Web site will feature scientific visualizations and computational models adapted to public learning environments from research work being conducted by STCs and other academic research partners. First-person narrative videos of scientists and their research produced by Twin Cities Public Television now are on display in the Future Earth exhibit and also have been packaged into a half-hour program for broadcast statewide. The intended strategic impact on the field of informal STEM education is twofold: (1) explore how to accelerate the dissemination of scientific research to public audiences; (2) investigate ways science centers/museums can serve as forums for public policy dialogues.
The purpose of this Communicating Research to Public Audiences project is to develop a suite of media products to raise awareness about global-warming-induced sea level rise and how scientists study it. The project will focus on Dr. Maureen Raymo's NSF funded research which looks to the Pliocene era thought to be the most recent time in geologic history with a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with levels as high as today. The multimedia materials including video footage, photographic images, and audio recordings will be widely distributed on the internet, on kiosks in science centers, and through podcasts. Collaborations with numerous organizations will ensure widespread dissemination of the multimedia materials. Some of the collaborators include Climate Central, a new nonprofit science and media organization; Encyclopedia of Earth, a peer-review, open access electronic reference about the Earth; and Audubon magazine among others. The project will also disseminate its resources through organizations and websites that reach teachers and students in classrooms. Rockman Et Al will evaluate the project impacts conducting both formative and summative evaluations. Focus groups and online surveys will be conducted at various stages providing feedback to the project team as well as a summative evaluation of audience impacts.
Mystic Seaport received an implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a suite of online, onsite, offsite, and onboard public programs and exhibits that will provide new national insight into universal and important humanities themes, through an interdisciplinary exploration of historic and contemporary American whaling. The Museum and its partners will explore through this project how, when, and why dominant American perceptions of whales and whaling took their dramatic turns. The project will raise public awareness in New England and nationwide about the role the whaling industry played in the development of our nation’s multi-ethnic make-up, our domestic economy, our global impact and encounters, and our long-standing fascination with whales. And it will promote thought about the nation’s whaling heritage, and how it continues to shape our communities and culture.
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.
Between the Waters is a website and interactive virtual tour that will showcase the culture and history of Hobcaw Barony, a 17,500 acre historic site in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is arguably the setting for a greater confluence of humanities themes than any other in the state. Using the website’s artifacts, structures and landmarks as storytelling cues, Between the Waters will connect material culture to the lives of those who inhabited Hobcaw and interpret their history for the general public. The non-linear navigation of Between the Waters will encourage inquiry, analysis and deductive reasoning, giving visitors the skills and incentive to explore and reflect upon the multifaceted story of Hobcaw Barony, how it has helped to shape the American present and its implications for the future of South Carolina and the country.