Data is increasingly important in all aspects of people’s lives, from the day-to-day, to careers and to civic engagement. Preparing youth to use data to answer questions and solve problems empowers them to participate in society as informed citizens and opens doors to 21st century career opportunities. Ensuring equitable representation in data literacy and data science careers is critical. For many girls underrepresented in STEM, developing a "data science identity" requires personally meaningful experiences working with data. This project aims to promote middle school-aged girls’ interest and aspirations in data science through an identity-aligned, social game-based learning approach. The goals are to create a more diverse and inclusive generation of data scientists who see data as a resource and who are equipped with the skills and dispositions necessary to work with data in order to solve practical problems. The research team will run 10 social clubs and 10 data science clubs mentored by women in data science recruited through the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Participants will be 250 middle school-aged girls recruited in Miami, FL, and Yolo County, CA, through local and national girls’ organizations. Youth will participate in a data science club and will learn key data science concepts and skills, including data structures, storage, exploration, analysis, and visualization. These concepts will be learned from working with their own data collected in personally meaningful ways in addition to working with data collected by others in the same social game eco-system. The project will also develop facilitator materials to allow adult volunteers to create game-based informal data science learning experiences for youth in their areas. The project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments and is co-funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), which seeks to engage underrepresented students in technology-rich learning environments, including skills in data literacy, and increase students’ knowledge and interest in information and communication technology (ICT) careers.
Researchers will focus on two primary research questions: 1) Across gameplay and club experiences, in what ways do participants engage with data to pursue personal or social goals? 2) How do gameplay and club experiences shape girls’ perceptions of data, data science, and their fit with data and data science? The project will use design-based research methods to iteratively design the game and social club experiences. To ensure that uses of data feel personally and socially meaningful to young girls, the virtual world’s goals, narratives, and activities will be co-designed with girls from groups underrepresented in data science. The project will research engagement with game data in two informal, game-based learning scenarios: organic, self-directed, social play club, and structured, adult-facilitated data science clubs. The research will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods including surveys, focus groups, interviews, and gameplay and club observations. Project evaluation will determine how gameplay and club experiences impact participants' attitudes toward and interest in data-rich futures. The project holds the potential for broadening participation and promoting interest in data science by blending game-based learning with the rich social and adult mentoring through club participation. The results will be disseminated through conference presentations, scholarly publications, and social media. The game and facilitator materials will be designed for dissemination and made freely available to the public.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lisa HardyGary GoldbergerJennifer Kahn
This study researched whether and how affiliation with the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net) led to change in informal science education organizations’ (ISEs) practices. The NISE Net provided an opportunity to look at how participation in a large but loosely-structured network of museums, science centers, educators, and scientists can influence museums to experience organizational change and adopt new practices.
By conducting qualitative case studies of a few selected partners, this research aimed to understand the conditions that facilitate or impede the influence of
Be a 4-H Scientist! Materials in a Green, Clean World is an inquiry-based science curriculum focusing on concepts of materials; plastics; reuse, recycle, and reduce; and the work of scientists and engineers. It is designed to build foundational skills of science and engineering: observation, asking questions, sorting and classifying, and communicating. The curriculum contains six learning modules intended for delivery in out-of-school time facilitated by an educator (trained volunteers or program staff). Most modules also include a “Science At Home” activity which parents/other adults and children can do at home.
This paper argues that for citizens to be engaged with science they need to be able to share analytical techniques as well as the results of analyses. The category of "brand" which condenses the instrumental with the symbolic is both powerful in its uses and familiar to laypeople. The paper shows briefly how the categories of penicillin, biotechnology and applied science can be analysed in this way. It suggests that historians apply such an approach to the historiography of such new categories as synthetic biology and that this might be useful to curators of such topics in museums.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. How can we come to terms with the complex social impact of new cutting-edge fields like synthetic biology, robotics, genetics and
machine learning? In order to manage these transformative changes, people not only need to understand science and technology, but also to actively participate in shaping a world where our ability to control the building blocks of life and cognition is vastly expanded. The Transmedia Museum will use the interactive, engaging nature of
New forms of co-working spaces and community labs, such as Hackerspaces and Fablabs, but also open science and citizen science initiatives, by involving new actors often described as makers, tinkerers, and hackers enable innovation and research outside the walls of academia and industry. These alternative and global innovation networks are test beds for studying new forms of public engagement and participation in emergent scientific fields, such as nanotechnology. The article shows how these grassroots and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or Do-It-With- Others (DIWO) research subcultures connect politics
In the last decade, social studies of nanotechnology have been characterized by a specific focus on the role of communication and cultural representations. Scholars have documented a proliferation of the forms through which this research area has been represented, communicated and debated within different social contexts. This Jcom section concentrates on the proliferation of cultural spaces where nanotechnologies are articulated and shaped in society. The intent is that of showing how these different cultural spaces — with their specific features and implications — raise multiple issues and
The knowledge society is a new social species that, despite many uncertainties and some (old and new) ambiguities, is emerging on the horizon of the 21st century. Placed at the convergence of two long-term processes (society of individuals and knowledge society), it is characterised by the social-economic process of knowledge circulation, which can be divided into four fundamental phases (generation, institutionalisation, spreading and socialisation). The current situation also sees the traditional (modern) structure of knowledge being outdated by the convergence of nanotechnologies
ECSITE is the European network of science centres and museums (www.ecsite.net). The ECSITE Annual Conference, attended every year by several hundreds of professionals in science museums and science centres (870 at the last edition), and the ECSITE director forum, where full members of the association discuss on focused topics, are excellent observation points. Looking at what goes on in these meetings allows to track what is high on the agenda of the science-centre community, how the focus of interest moves, what are the main concerns of museum professionals.
In recent weeks, Britain’s Better Regulation Task Force report on scientific research regulation asked the Government to evaluate the risks associated with the development of Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies. The Government was also asked to prove its implementation of a specific policy to protect human, animal and environmental safety, were it to be threatened by the development of this emerging field of knowledge. These requests may sound rather alarming. However, objectively speaking, the precautionary attitude of the Better Regulation Task Force does not differ greatly from that of the U
The Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Network) is a national infrastructure that links science museums and other informal science education organizations with nanoscale science and engineering research organizations. The Network’s overall goal is to foster public awareness, engagement, and understanding of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology. As part of the front-end effort, this report, Part IIB, documents 19 nanoscale STEM programming, media, and school-based projects that have been completed or are in development as of 2005.
The Museum of Science, Boston (MOS) and its primary collaborators, the Science Museum of Minnesota (St. Paul, MN) and the Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), are continuing and expanding the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), which has been in operation since 2005. NISE Net has established a national infrastructure of over one-hundred hands-on science centers and universities within seven regional hubs with the goal of fostering public awareness, engagement and understanding of nanoscale science and engineering (NSE). As part of this undertaking, NISE Net partners have: - created a nation-wide set of annual events called NanoDays; - developed dozens of interactive exhibits, media-based products, programs, and public forums based on NSE; - generated new knowledge about the design for learning about NSE, its applications, and societal implications; - produced a network that involves informal educators and researchers; and - developed a Web site for professionals, www.nisenet.org, that includes several resources for educators and researchers, including a catalog of educational products. During the next five years (2010 - 2014), NISE Net will continue to develop new educational products, deepen the involvement of current partnerships in nanoscale informal science education, and expand the number of partners overall to 300 organizations. The advisory committee, content steering committee, regional hubs, and other work groups will continue to develop collaborative relationships between museums and university-based NSE research centers, including Materials Research Science and Engineering Research Centers (MRSECs) and Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers (NSECs). A Diversity, Equity, and Access group will actively support, foster, and encourage the NISE Net\'s efforts to reach diverse audiences with regard to geography, dis/ability, gender, race/ethnicity, language, and income. Four research studies will be conducted: Partnership and Network, Institutional Change, Learning Progressions, and Evidence-Based Decision Making.