This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This project's research questions include:
How and to what extent do Brains On!’s coronavirus-based episodes help children and their families understand and talk about science-related pandemic topics? What kind of conversations are sparked by these episodes?
What kinds of worries and questions do Brains On! listeners have about coronavirus and related aspects of the pandemic? How do children’s worries and questions change over the course of the pandemic?
What resources do caregivers need to answer children’s questions
Conversations with parents during engagement in informal learning settings, such as museums, can play a critical role in facilitating young children’s early experiences and interest in STEM (Jant et al., 2014; NRC, 2012). There is an acute need to support early STEM engagement for underrepresented families. Successful community partnerships between informal learning settings and Head Start are one way to broaden participation, interest, and success in the STEM fields for underrepresented children and families.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This poster presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting describes the goals of a five-year CAREER AISL project that brings together researchers, educators, designers, and facilitators to investigate how families exercise their agency in museum settings, and how science center exhibits can give families greater authority as STEM learners.
The project involves 1) research studies exploring how family groups express agency through their perceptions and actions at a range of STEM exhibits; and 2) a collaborative working group made up of staff across departments at the New York Hall of
The ICBOs (Independent Community-based Organizations), a group of fifteen community representatives from communities historically excluded from the sciences, share results from eight years of community-led de-colonial participatory action research. We wrote this white paper to share our findings and recommendations with funders like the National Science Foundation. These findings, recently published in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac001), along with preliminary results from our current research, and our lived experiences point towards a critical need to change the existing
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen PurcellBobby WilsonMakeda CheatomJohn AnnoniTanya Schuh
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being.
The Formative Evaluation for the Mars Habitat exhibit was conducted to gather visitor feedback on a prototype of the exhibit component. Data was collected in three rounds, and the exhibit component was updated as necessary between rounds. Evaluation questions focused on understanding if visitors knew what to do while at the Mars Habitat exhibit, how visitors interacted with both the exhibit and each other, and if visitors walked away with an understanding of the intended activity goals. These were explored through both observation and a follow-up interview. This report summarizes findings
The Lineage project was a collaboration between Twin Cities Public Television and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The project included creation of a feature-length video program, a Virtual Reality game, and a set of hands-on activities designed for use by multigenerational audiences—all of which were incorporated as part of a series of seven Fossil Festival events at museums and other sites around the United States. This report presents findings from a set of external evaluation studies that examined impacts on families who participated in Fossil Festival events as well
Making experiences and activities are rich with opportunities for mathematical reasoning that often go unrecognized by both participants and educators. Since 2015, we have been exploring this potential through the Math in the Making initiative. The work focuses particularly on children’s museums and science centers, many of which have developed maker spaces and programs over the last decade. In this article, we share insights from our most recent round of research. To begin, we consider the fundamental question of what it means to authentically integrate mathematics with making.
Children spend 80% of their waking hours outside of school in the community. Deep inequities exist in access to high quality informal STEM learning opportunities (museums, zoos, safe and beautiful parks). Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) infuses playful learning opportunities into everyday community spaces where families spend time. This project represents a strength-based model for designing play spaces deeply connected to communities’ cultural assets.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Andres BustamanteVanessa BermudezJulie SalazarLeiny GarciaKreshnik BegolliKarlena OchoaJune AhnKathy Hirsh-PasekAnnelise PeschRigoberto RodriguezPaola Padilla
This project engages families in engineering design challenges through a sustainability and biomimicry lens. Families advance their engineering proficiencies while learning from nature to create a livable future.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Head Start on Engineering is an ongoing initiative focused on empowering families to use engineering to help their children thrive. We aspire to collaborate as equal partners with the communities we serve and inform a more equitable vision for engineering education in our society.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. The Guerilla Science project conducted two studies: one at the Oregon Eclipse Festival, a large multi-day residential music and arts festival, and one during the Figment festival, a cultural and family-oriented free festival on Governor’sIsland (NewYorkCity). We used a multi-method research design: trained data collectors conducted intercept interviews of various length; short written feedback forms were made available post events; and we conducted structured observations of events.We compared Guerilla Science audiences with