Communicating Climate Change (C3) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to foster innovative partnerships between research centers, the media, and science centers. David Heil & Associates, Inc. (DHA) is providing front-end, formative, and summative evaluation for the project. This report summarizes findings from Year 1 audience research that explored visitor attitudes towards climate change and interest in climate change-related programs and activities.
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Kasey McCrackenAssociation of Science Technology Centers
August, 2009 Communities of Effective Practice, 2008-2009 Evaluation Abstract: The Communities of Effective Practice (CEP) project is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project to develop a professional development model for supporting math and science instructional practices that are culturally responsive within American Indian communities. This report summarizes findings from the Year 3 evaluation (conducted during the 2008-2009 academic year) and discusses these findings within the context of the Years 1 and 2 evaluations. It presents key considerations for developing a Community
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Gina MaghariousKasey McCrackenUtah State University
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
The exhibit Coffee The World in Your Cup was designed by and installed at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture running from January 24, 2009 through September 7. The exhibit presents the story of one of the world's most widely traded commodities and how it has affected cultures, economies, and environments across the globe. Coffee explores the environmental and social impacts of the coffee industry and recommends ways for consumers to make socially and environmentally responsible coffee purchases at the grocery store or in a coffee shop. The exhibit space is approximately 2,000
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Nick VisscherUniversity of WashingtonSarah MartinezErin Wilcox
The summative evaluation of Yuungnaqpiallerput used two evaluation strategies--tracking and timing (T&T) and an open-ended questionnaire (CQ)--to discover how visitors used the exhibition and what they could immediately recall about it. The combined data from these methods produced a well-rounded set of evidence for the degree of success achieved by the exhibition. Yuungnaqpiallerput was designed to be engaging to both an Alaska Native American audience and non-natives. Of the 61 people in the CQ sample, 69% said that they were first-time visitors to the Anchorage Museum, and 75% had no
Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World, a 2,500-square-foot permanent exhibition, contains more than 100 rare, important, and beautiful books and manuscripts from the Huntington's collections, along with artifacts and interactive experiences. The content focuses on the changing role of science through the centuries, with particular emphasis on some of the astonishing leaps in imagination made by scientists and the importance of written works in communicating those ideas. There were 52 exhibit elements in subject areas of Astronomy, Natural History, Medicine, and Light. Feedback on the
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Beverly SerrellThe Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Columbia University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and New York Hall of Science (NYHOS) partnered to create Research and Rolling Exhibits (RARE). The project's goal is to showcase current research in science and make it accessible to the general public. Five Wondercarts were created over three years, from 2005 through 2008, highlighting topical scientific research and its relevance to the museum's target audience. The carts were programmed to engage families in conversation, letting their interest determine the direction of activities. In this manner Wondercarts
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Ellen GiustiNew York Hall of ScienceKathleen Condon
How People Make Things is an exhibition that helps families talk together and learn about the making of everyday objects. The goal of the project was to create a learning environment that mediates difficult manufacturing concepts for parents, and scaffolds the development of family conversations about the processes of making both inside and outside the museum. A visit to the exhibition would be deemed successful if visitors demonstrated changes in what they knew and how they talked about objects and manufacturing processes. A model of change describing how families might build such an
This project is aimed at creating a language / framework independent Gesture Recognition toolkit that takes OSC messages formatted with TUIO specification as input and outputs recognized gestures via OSC protocol. I will use the gesture recognition toolkit AMELiA to describe models specifically for the domain of multitouch gestures. This project will enable multitouch application developers to easily define a gesture and utilize it within their application, creating more engaging experiences.
Creating and editing large graphs and node-link diagrams are crucial activities in many application areas. For them, we consider multi-touch and pen input on interactive surfaces as very promising. This fundamental work presents a user study investigating how people edit node-link diagrams on an interactive tabletop. The study covers a set of basic operations, such as creating, moving, and deleting diagram elements. Participants were asked to perform spontaneous gestures for 14 given tasks. They could interact in three different ways: using one hand, both hands, as well as pen and hand
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Mathias FrischJens HeydekornRaimund Dachselt
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