There is no formula for starting a science center. Science centers are as variable as the communities that surround them and the people who plan them. They may be of modest or monumental proportions and grow at different rates and in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of common themes and dimensions that appear to be critical to their success.
This paper was presented at the 122nd ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in June 2015, by the Boeing Company, the University of Washington, College of Education LIFE Center, and the City University of Seattle. Abstract Skills-based volunteerism programs can provide technical employees effective and meaningful opportunities to utilize, develop, and transfer their skills while contributing to their companies’ community engagement objectives in K-12 education. While many companies encourage their employees to engage in education-related volunteerism, these efforts are often one-off events
The overall purpose of the Kinetic City (KC) Empower project was to examine how informal science activities can be made accessible for students with disabilities. The premise of this project was that all students, including those with disabilities, are interested in and capable of engaging in science learning experiences, if these experiences are accessible to them. Drawing on resources from Kinetic City, a large collection of science experiments, games, and projects developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the project researched and adapted five after
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Bob HirshonLaureen SummersBabette MoellerWendy Martin
Over the final five years of the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), the “Research on Public Learning and Decision-Making” (PLDM) team studied how visitors make decisions and learn about nanotechnologies through a variety of NISE Network educational products. The focus of this report is an exploratory study conducted on the Nano exhibition in order to answer the research question: How do visitors use, interact with, and talk about the exhibit components within the Nano exhibition to learn about the relevance of nano to their lives? To answer this question, PLDM team
This poster was presented at the NSF AISL PI meeting in Washington D.C. in 2014. The poster describes the impact of Be A Scientist and explores Iridescent's strategic vision.
This IMLS-funded study sought to examine the impact of educator-facilitation on engineering attitudes and self-efficacy of children in Design Challenges activities. Using a quasi-experimental design with statistically comparable pre- and post-experience groups, researchers collected observation, interview, and survey data to address the following research questions:
1. Do visitors’ perceptions of engineering activities improve as a result of the facilitated Design Challenges experience?
2. What aspects of the interactions between museum educators and Design Challenges visitors contribute
Creating Museum Media for Everyone is an NSF-funded collaborative project of the Museum of Science, the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, Ideum, and Audience Viewpoints, to further the science museum field's understanding of ways to research, develop, and evaluate digital interactives that are inclusive of all people. As a part of this effort to enable museums to integrate more accessible media into their exhibits to make them more welcoming and educational for visitors with disabilities as well as general audiences, this paper provides an overview of approaches to media accessibility
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency and are having an increasing effect on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mike SharplesAnne AdamsNonye AlozieRebecca FergusonElizabeth FitzGeraldMark GavedPatrick McAndrewBarbara MeansJulie RemoldBart RientiesJeremy RoschelleKea VogtDenise WhitelockLouise Yarnall
Afterschool programs have emerged as a dynamic and vibrant setting for innovative STEM education and there has been rapid growth in this field over the past few years. Although many of the statewide afterschool networks are collecting data from afterschool providers in their states on afterschool STEM programming, this report offers the first national look at availability and access to afterschool STEM programs and parental attitudes and expectations for such programs. The America After 3PM survey is the most comprehensive study of how school-age children in the United States spend their after
Over recent years, there has been much discussion of the status of science communication as a discipline, as a field of empirical research and theoretical reflection. In our own contributions to that discussion, we have tended to raise questions about the possibilities of this ‘emerging discipline’ (Trench & Bucchi 2010). We have some-times drawn attention to the marks of immaturity—notably, the relatively underdeveloped state of theory in the field.
But when a major international academic publisher commissions an anthology of ‘major works’ in our field, we can surely say that science
To address this challenge of depicting a world we can't see, the NISE Network Visualization Laboratory at the Exploratorium invited artists and scientists to explore ways of representing the nanoscale through a series of commissions, installations, and residencies in 2006. Drawing from a spectrum of artistic media and approaches, the results of these experiences are documented in this report. The PDF is a printable, archival document of the ArtNano website that was produced by the Exploratorium for the NISE Network in 2007.