This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the popular PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats!
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marisa WolskyJanna KookJessica Andrews
Imagination Station, Toledo’s Science Center, will implement Toledo Tinkers: Through a Child’s Eyes — a new initiative to address barriers to STEM education and promote a lifelong love of those subjects. An outreach curriculum and a mobile tinkering lab will help children ages 11–13 and their families establish personal connections with making and tinkering. Pilot programs will include the Maker Club — a 12-session out-of-school program for students from Boys and Girls Clubs of Toledo and other community-based organizations — as well as Tinkering Takeovers, which is a drop-in tinkering program for families at branch libraries. A community exhibition will showcase the diversity of the Toledo community and its rich history of making and tinkering, using the work of participating children.
Sciencenter will use a co-development process to strengthen rural engagement with hands-on and inquiry-based STEM for families and children. The museum will initiate the project in partnership with Moravia Central School District and Groton Public Library. The project team will also collaborate with advisors who have expertise in reaching rural audiences. Project activities will increase the museum's understanding of rural communities' needs around STEM. The museum will work with additional rural partners to develop activities and programs that meet identified needs. An external evaluator will track project progress and measure results. This evaluator will also train the museum's staff on data collection and recording methods. Data analysis throughout the project will support changes in programs and activities as needed.
Miami Children's Museum will redesign its Construction Zone Gallery into a STEM-learning space providing children, primarily ages eight and under, with a stimulating and interactive experience. The exhibition will incorporate 13 distinctive exhibition components, allowing full engagement in a variety of STEM-based learning activities. The museum will conduct focus group activities with field interpreters, specialists and educators working in STEM fields to guide and refine content development of the script and exhibition layout, followed by testing of the themes, programming activities, exhibition props and tools, software concepts, and learning outcomes. The project team will develop accompanying programming for children to be presented at the museum and at area public libraries. All components of the exhibition will support Florida's Early Learning Standards, and will meet the evolving educational needs of its youngest learners.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Anais Rodriguez
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Iteration is a central practice in art and science; however, it has yet to be deeply explored in STEAM learning environments. This study adopts a sociomaterial orientation (Fenwick and Edwards, 2013) to characterize the nature of iteration in one STEAM activity, an Optics Design Challenge, with informal educators. We found that iteration emerged as “microcycles” of interactions, specifically as adjustments, additions, and negotiations in both material artifacts and the narrative.
The Brookfield Zoo will launch the Zoo Explorers Club to provide underserved middle school students with free informal STEM education in public libraries and community centers in majority African American and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, Cicero, and Melrose Park, Illinois. The program will consist of two four-week units per year, themed around STEM topics of interest to sixth-eighth graders. Students will participate in informal sessions that include hands-on science experiments, outdoor observations, craft projects, or animal experiences designed with the varied learning styles of middle school students in mind. Students will also participate in a free field trip to a zoo, nature center, museum, or other destination related to the unit topic. The curriculum will be designed to facilitate science learning through inquiry for up to 180 students per year, and empower young people to see themselves as agents of conservation solutions.
Children and their families are practicing STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) skills through a library program. Hand-crank generators and LED bulbs are set out on each of the tables, along with two types of dough—conductive play dough and insulating modeling clay.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Brooks MitchellClaire RatcliffeKeliann LaConte
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
In the 1990s, Science Cafes emerged that brought together people from all walks of life with scientists in conversation over science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics. The cafes were popular as conversations were informal in casual settings and engendered deep discussions. In 2007, Science Education Solutions received a grant from NSF and began an experiment to see if the adult science café model could be adapted to appeal to high school teens. The program, Café Scientifique New Mexico, became very popular with teens in towns across northern New Mexico. The blend of conversing with scientists about interesting science topics in an out-of-school social setting and digging deeper with hands on activities proved successful. The teen model was refined through trial and error and formal evaluation over several years. Today it continues to provide teens with a new perspective on the nature of science and a picture of scientists as real people leading interesting lives. The Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) was formed in 2012 with NSF funding to allow other individuals and organizations to start their own versions of the Teen Science Café, adapted to their local institutions and demographics. Five founding member organizations around the United States formed the initial Network and each began creating their own Teen Science Café programs. Today the TSCN is a dynamic, growing community of practice spread across the country with the mission of connecting high school teenagers with STEM and STEM experts via the science café model. The network currently has approximately 133 member organizations in 46 states and Canada. This project will move the network to a much larger scale by creating organization and professional support structures to create a strategically growing social movement with distributed leadership, organizational infrastructure, and robust professional development for long-term stability with a goal to increase the number of member organizations to 500 over five years. Building on the literature on professional development for informal science educators and the literature on network capacity building, network sustainability, and scale, the project will also conduct research that will inform the field about successful model diffusion. This 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. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understanding of deeper learning by participants.
This Innovations in Development project has five objectives. The first is to re-structure the Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) to a more distributed leadership model that will move the network to long-term sustainability. The PI team will identify five experienced individuals already leading strong café programs to become Guides for new sites. These Guides will provide training, support, and mentorship to new network members. Each Guide will have responsibility over a given year for mentoring two cohorts of nine sites, allowing the network to increase in size over the next five years. The second objective is to implement an interactive program of professional development for new network members. The training will involve approximately 15 hours of adult leader training focused on building skills around teen engagement and café management. The third objective will be to strategically engage all members in the network community of practice through opportunities to participate in and lead ongoing learning with their peers. Through webinars, Birds of a Feather groups and annual workshops and a Science Events Summit, café leaders will actively hone professional skills and broaden their personal network. Objective four is to broaden the involvement of organizations and communities not currently in the network through strategic recruitment of STEM professional societies, military youth programs, library networks, and youth-serving organizations, among other organizations. Finally, objective five is to implement a research agenda to contribute to the informal learning knowledge base. The research will focus on how the project's approach to network growth and distributed leadership leads to effective scaling and sustainability.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Youth generate data in the form of social media posts, and they are likely to understand that these data can be used by others for multiple purposes. However, they may be less likely to know that other personal data, such as records related to shopping patterns or medical visits, can also be tracked, analyzed, and used. Consequently, today's young people have a personal stake in their ability to understand and critically question multiple types of data practices. This project will advance knowledge regarding how informal educational organizations can empower young people in a data-centric world. In partnership with public libraries in New York City, Pratt Institute will develop a model for supporting critical data literacy in informal settings. Critical data literacy includes the ability to critique data practices throughout the data life cycle; to situate data within broader contexts such as cyberinfrastructures and societal trends; and to use data to answer questions and to achieve purposes that are personally meaningful and important. To develop a model of informal education that supports critical data literacy, the project team will co-design data literacy sessions with teenagers in libraries. These data literacy sessions will provide teens with opportunities to engage in critical data practices and inquiry in the context of issues they identify as being important to them. The project team will conduct research on the methods that support youths' co-design of critical data literacy programs. This project will result in a model of a youth-driven educational program that can be scaled and enacted in libraries and informal settings nationwide, with the ultimate purpose of fostering a more empowered, data-literate citizenry.
The project will recruit 25 teenagers ages 13-17, including those from underrepresented groups, to co-design and implement four to six 90-minute critical data literacy sessions in a public library. The research team will use design-based participatory research to study the process of co-design, and they will improve this co-design process with three additional cohorts of 25 teenagers each. This study will answer the following three research questions: (1) How can critical data literacy be supported within the sociohistorical context of the public library in ways that speak to young people? (2) How can the affordances of co-design scaffold meaningful informal learning about critical data literacy? (3) What do the designs and artifacts created by young people say about sustained engagement and learning with regard to facets of critical data literacy? To answer these questions, the research team will use thematic and descriptive coding to analyze data sources such as interviews and focus groups with teens and library staff, observations of critical data literacy sessions, youth-generated artifacts, and surveys with youth participants. Empirical findings will be disseminated widely through professional networks, conferences, and journals for informal educators, educational researchers, and information scientists, and the co-design model will be disseminated widely to practitioners of informal science education. This project is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This Pilot and Feasability Study award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Leanne BowlerMark RosinIrene Lopatovska
This study addresses the increasing interest in family learning in informal settings by investigating strategies to better engage families in science talk and practices. As part of a larger design-based research study, we examine how scientists and parents use think-pair-share discussion prompts to support families’ understandings about local community water sources and facilitate experimentation with a surface and underground water model. Grounded in sociocultural theory of learning, we focus on parent-child interactions and family sensemaking. We analyzed four water quality workshops with 44
This project will focus on addressing the challenges faced by rural youth with a particular emphasis on those youth who are English Language Learners. The project will provide informal education via libraries and librarians which can provide unique opportunities for rural youth and communities. Building on several years of research and experimentation, this project will augment the formal education sector, as well. The settings for the project are 12 rural school districts in largely Latinx communities. The project partners are the Space Science Institute, the American Library Association (ALA), the Institute for Learning Innovation and the Twin Cities Public Television. Expertise from the Latinx community will play a significant part in the project. The project will engage learners from diverse backgrounds, ages, and interests in science through a coordinated and tested strategy incorporating three Learning Pathways (i.e., Science Learning Spaces, Programs, and Science Kits) in a public library environment. The results should yield a model for Nationwide application.
The main goals are: 1) to establish learning pathways to engage rural communities through exhibit host libraries and (2) to increase art-rich STEM learning opportunities for rural communities through libraries and their support systems. Building on an established training model, the project will introduce library staff to the STEAM content of the exhibits and guide them in developing their own STEAM Learning Pathways. SciGirls digital media, hands-on activities, family resources, and a training network will expand the depth and reach of the project. The project draws on existing professional infrastructure to increase library staff capacity through ALA and the Institute's established community of practice. The researchers will study the efficacy of each pathway, alone and in tandem, on participant's interest development and persistence. The research will use a mixed-methods design-based approach that involves questionnaires, interviews and case studies.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
Libraries can provide unique opportunities for rural youth and communities. Phase III of the STAR Library Network will be a collaboration with 12 rural school districts in largely Latinx communities to address the challenges faced by rural youth, particularly English Language Learners. The project will use a coordinated and tested strategy to establish three learning pathways in public libraries: science learning spaces with exhibits, library programs, and science kits. These resources will provide learners with art-rich STEM learning opportunities.
Partners
Project partners include the Space Science Institute, the American Library Association (ALA), the Institute for Learning Innovation, and Twin Cities Public Television. The project will rely significantly on expertise from the Latinx community.
Project Plan
Building on an established librarian training model, the project will introduce library staff to the STEAM content and guide them in developing their own STEAM Learning Pathways. The project will draw on existing professional infrastructure from the ALA and the Institute for Learning Innovation’s established community of practice. SciGirls digital media, hands-on activities, family resources, and a training network will expand the depth and reach of the project.
The Research
The research team will study the efficacy of each pathway, alone and in tandem, on participant’s interest development and persistence. The research will use a mixed-methods design-based approach that involves questionnaires, interviews, and case studies. The results should yield a model for nationwide application and contribute insights for the formal education sector.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.