LIGO's Science Education Center is in charge of Education and Public Outreach Component for the LIGO Livingston Observatory. The three prime efforts are: (1) Professional development for teachers utilizing lab facilities and cross-institute collaborations. (2) Outreach to students K-16 (targeting 5- 9th grade), with on-site field trips to the LIGO Lab and Science Education Center, as well as off-site visits & presentations. (3) Outreach to the general public and community groups with on-site tours and Science Education Center Experience, as well as off=site visits and presentations. LIGO's Science Education Center is located at the LIGO Observatory, and has an auditorium, a classroom and a 5000 square foot exhibit hall with interactive exhibits at its disposal to complete its mission. In addition LIGO-SEC staff serve to help press and documentary film makers complete their missions in telling the "LIGO story" and encouraging budding scientists.
NESCent’s Education & Outreach efforts are designed and developed to improve evolution education and public understanding of evolutionary science, expand opportunities for underrepresented groups, and contribute to professional development of tomorrow’s evolutionary biologists. Our programs and initiatives serve a diverse array of audiences (students, faculty, general public) at a variety of levels (K-12, undergraduate/graduate/postdoc, informal science education).
The Observatory’s “Education and Outreach” (EDU) capability is designed to facilitate the interface between the Observatory and communities of users. Ultimately, our goal is to empower people to effectively use NEON data to enable understanding of continental-scale ecological change over time. To ensure that NEON science/data products are accessible to and usable by diverse communities, including scientists, students, educators, citizen scientists, decision-makers and the interested general public, we provide a suite of online data-centric resources/tools, workshops, a variety of courses, internship/research programs for undergraduates, and citizen science projects.
Several major international studies recognize that children (and adults) pursue lifelong STEM interests and understandings, in and out of school, using a variety of community resources and networks. In most communities though, these resources are not well connected with one another, nor is there understanding on the ground of how children and adults can best access and use these resources to support their lifelong STEM interests and learning. The SYNERGIES project is predicated on the assumption that better understanding how 10-14 year old youth become interested and engaged with STEM (or not) across settings, time and space, will make possible a more coordinated network of educational opportunities, involving many partners in and out of school, and in the process, create a community-wide, research-based educational system that is more effective and synergistic. Using the under-resourced Parkrose community of Portland, Oregon as a case-study, the SYNERGIES team has been longitudinally studying the STEM interest and participation pathways of 200 youth for four years. Data from this investigation formed the foundation for a community-wide, multi-year STEM education improvement plan jointly developed by the schools, after-school providers, museums, libraries, parks, colleges, parents and businesses.
We have a wide spectrum of informal programs that include museum-based programs, afterschool programs, an NSF AISL project on science identity formation in girls, observatory visitor center programs, night-based programs, programs for Native American groups, undergraduate student-based outreach programs,and professional development for informal educations.
At the CSMC, we have three main goals for our Outreach and Education activities, and we do our best to accomplish all three goals with all of our programs and activities. These goals include increasing young peoples' interest in STEM, increasing adults' appreciation of the importance of publicly funded research, and professional development for our students, post docs and PIs. With that in mind, we have created a suite of education and outreach programs that highlight professional development for the people doing the outreach while also accomplishing our outreach goals. Our programs include hosting local and regional Science Pub events, participating in Meet-a-Scientist style outreach events at schools and science and technology centers, and something called the Oregon Outreach Days tours. These tours combine a Science Pub event for the public in the evening with meetings with business, political and educational leaders during the day.
Based on nearly two decades of museum programming for low-income Hispanic and African American girls at the Miami Science Museum, this extension service project employs a train-the-trainers approach to build a network of museum-based Extension Agents dedicated to helping informal science educators attract the interest and support the persistence of minority girls, grades 6-12, currently underrepresented in STEM studies. Led by the Miami Science Museum, the collaboration brings together an experienced group of institutions with representation from the informal science, gender research, and engineering communities. In addition to the Museum, the Expert Project Team consists of key staff from the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), and SECME Inc. (formerly the Southeastern Consortium of Minorities in Engineering), who serve as the conduit for the participation of minority engineering professional organizations. An advisory/research panel of researchers in gender in STEM, whose work complements those of the project investigators, works closely with the Expert Project Team to prepare Extension Agents from ten geographically dispersed museums, who in turn provide a range of training and peer mentoring services to the practitioner community of informal science educators in science-rich institutions nationwide. Participating museums include: Connecticut Science Center (Hartford, CT), New York Hall of Science (New York, NY), Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD), Miami Science Museum (Miami, FL), COSI (Columbus, OH), St. Louis Science Center (St. Louis, MO), Louisville Science Center (Louisville, KY), Sci-Port (Shreveport, LA), Explora (Albuquerque, NM), and California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, CA).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judy BrownLaura Huerta MigasMichele Williams
The Education and Outreach (EO) program is an essential part of the CRISP MRSEC located at Yale and SCSU. CRISP offers activities that promote the interdisciplinary and innovative aspects of materials science to a diverse group of participants. The objective of the program is to enhance the education of future scientists, science teachers, K-12 students, parents, and the general public. CRISP’s primary informal science activities include public lectures, family science nights, New Haven Science Fair and museum partnerships.
The LTER Network is an innovative platform for training the next generation of natural scientists in collaborative, integrative, long-term research in ecology. An important objective of the network is to share knowledge with other communities. The LTER Network Office addresses this objective by managing a Communication and Outreach program that targets key communities—scientists, policy makers, educators and students, and the mass media as a proxy of the rest of the non-specific audiences—and maintain strategic partnerships and collaborations that provide improved access to these communities.
The C-DEBI education program works with audiences at all levels (K-12, general public, undergraduate, graduate and beyond) in formal and informal settings (courses, public lectures, etc.). Sub-programs focus on community college research internships and professional development for graduate students and postdocs.
"Ongoing collaboration-wide IceCube Neutrino Observatory Education and Outreach efforts include: (1) Reaching motivated high school students and teachers through IceCube Masterclasses; (2) Providing intensive research experiences for teachers (in collaboration with PolarTREC) and for undergraduate students (NSF science grants, International Research Experience for Students (IRES), and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) funding); and (3) Supporting the IceCube Collaboration’s communications needs through social media, science news, web resources, webcasts, print materials, and displays (icecube.wisc.edu). The 2014 pilot IceCube Masterclass had 100 participating students in total at five institutions. Students met researchers, learned about IceCube hardware, software, and science, and reproduced the analysis that led to the discovery of the first high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Ten IceCube institutions will participate in the 2015 Masterclass. PolarTREC teacher Armando Caussade, who deployed to the South Pole with IceCube in January 2015, kept journals and did webcasts in English and Spanish. NSF IRES funding was approved in 2014, enabling us to send 18 US undergraduates for 10-week research experiences over the next three years to work with European IceCube collaborators. An additional NSF REU grant will provide support for 18 more students to do astrophysics research over the next three summers. At least one-third of the participants for both programs will be from two-year colleges and/or underrepresented groups. "
The mission of QESST public outreach is to provide a platform for engaging the community; students, parents, teachers, and the general public; in discussions about solar energy. Although there is a growing interest in advances of solar energy, many misconceptions prevail amongst the general community. Community outreach serves as a mechanism for engaging people and drawing them in. It is often the hook that creates interest in parents who pass that interest onto their children, or lures young students into more formalized QESST programs. Our outreach events range in scale from small workshops, large university wide open houses, and participation in educational television.