Learner Participation, Satisfaction, and Engagement with the Curiosity Machine, Camps, and Courses

This report describes an evaluation of two educational programs that Iridescent offered with a grant from the National Science Foundation. These two programs were developed for youth and their families and were organized around open-ended Engineering Design Challenges. These are hands-on problem-solving activities supported by a web-based platform known as the Curiosity Machine. The Curiosity Machine and the Design Challenges were designed to work together to engage learners in fundamental physics and engineering concepts in fun and open-ended ways, while enhancing their curiosity, creativity, and persistence. One of these programs consisted of the three-week, full-day (7 hours per day) Curiosity Camps for youth ages 7-12. Two consecutive Curiosity Camps were offered during the summer of 2014 at Iridescent’s Los Angeles studio. The other program was a five-week, ten-hour Curiosity Course for youth and their families. Eleven different Curiosity Courses were offered during 2014 and early 2015 around the country. Data from program attendance logs, Design Challenge submissions, end-of-course surveys, and reflections were used to document: (1) who the participants were and how much they participated, (2) how often they completed Design Challenges from home or outside of class time, (3) which Design Challenges were most popular, (4) how satisfied participants were with the Curiosity Machine website, the Design Challenges, and web-enabled feedback from volunteer mentors, (5) the extent to which learners engaged meaningfully with creativity, curiosity, and persistence, (6) whether families completing their second Curiosity Course were more satisfied than those completing their first, and (7) the strategies that learners appear to use when producing solutions to the Design Challenges.

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