The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan's Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways will organize a four-day educational symposium to build a better understanding of Native American culture and history. The project will begin with a forum to foster dialogue on the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Saginaw. The forum will discuss the treaty's impact on sovereignty and relationships between natives and non-natives and the loss of continuity of language, culture, and the practice of traditional art forms. The forum will include representatives from the 25 tribes whose children attended the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. The representatives will share cultural stories and traditional methods through birch bark, black ash, elm and sweet grass basket making. The symposium will conclude on Michigan Indian Day with science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) activities for area students.
KID Museum will develop and test a framework for working with community organizations to design learning experiences and create a facilitation guide for integrating cultural appreciation with maker-based learning. Building on its established Cultural Days programming, the museum will partner with four organizations that represent the region's largest ethnic populations. Together, they will plan, design, prototype, and refine new programs and experiences for children ages 4 to 14 and their families. The project team will adapt an IMLS-funded STEM-expert co-development model to develop and present cultural programs both at the museum and in the community. The project team will evaluate and refine the programs through visitor surveys. The museum will share the resulting framework and facilitation guide with other informal learning spaces to support the implementation of similar programs.
In response to a growing demand for early learner, in-school services for New York City's Universal Pre-kindergarten program, the Brooklyn Children's Museum will expand its outreach to schools in surrounding districts. The museum will create 24 new collections cases containing cultural and natural science objects. It will also develop related curricula and activity guides. A pre-K educator advisory council will work with the museum to ensure that the themes of the cases align with New York State Learning Standards for Pre-kindergarten and Pre-school students. The museum will also provide professional development workshops for up to 100 pre-K educators to support inquiry and object-based learning.
The University of California Museum of Paleontology will upgrade two STEM websites that provide free resources for teachers, students, and the public for teaching and learning about evolution and the process of science. The project will allow the museum to respond more effectively to user expectations and enhance the security, functionality, and general appeal of these educational resources. In consultation with expert advisors, the project team will review and revise the content and graphics on the 30 most-accessed, high-content pages of each site to ensure that they reflect the latest research and perspectives in the field. New features will also provide more opportunities for visitor interaction with scientific data. Both front-end and formative evaluation will guide the phases of the project.
ECHO will enhance its capacity to deliver impactful STEM learning experiences for its visitors through the implementation of a re-energized volunteer program. The museum will research innovative practices from the field and build upon best practices from across institutions to overhaul its volunteer training and management systems. Project activities will include building a blended training curriculum, in which volunteers participate in asynchronous and in-person interpretive content, and diversity and inclusion trainings. The museum will also improve its volunteer tracking systems, strengthen staff supervisor training, and revitalize its volunteer recognition and engagement activities. A community of practice will engage three other science centers to inform project activities and assist with the dissemination of a set of training tools adaptable across institutions.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio will expand its professional development program for educators in Chicago Public Schools and surrounding suburbs with low-income populations. The Teaching by Design program integrates design-based inquiry and problem-solving into K-12 curricula. It connects Wright's design philosophy to contemporary issues in STEAM subjects. Following a multi-year pilot, the trust will bring the project to scale by delivering 12 professional development seminars, developing 100 new lesson plans, enhancing the program's online platform, evaluating the project's short- and long-term impact, and cultivating a sustainable Teaching by Design learning community. The seminars will provide educators with a fully immersive artmaking and design experience that can be replicated in the classroom and connected to cross-curricular themes and learning standards. The project aims to reach 90 educators in at least 40 schools, 9,000 students, and an estimated 3,000 website users.
Building on program assessments and feedback, the Plains Art Museum will scale up its youth leadership-building program, Buzz Lab. The paid summer internship program engages teens in student-led, project-based learning in art and science. The program inspires the teens to lead community change while highlighting the art museum's role in addressing community needs. The program centers around the museum's pollinator garden, and the next phase of the project will engage interns with new and diverse project partners and guest speakers. For example, the interns will help find creative ways to streamline Buzz Lab projects for mass appeal and engage citizens around the pollinator crisis. The museum will also create a support network for interns entering post-secondary education programs by leveraging relationships with regional universities. Project assessment will be responsive to intern feedback so the teens become co-collaborators on the program's future.
The Portland Children’s Museum will open a new exhibition, “Drip City,” which focuses on water as a precious natural resource that has shaped the region’s geography, weather, and culture. Following an IMLS-funded evaluation and design process, the museum will engage a local fabrication company to construct and install exhibit components that explore concepts in science, engineering, and art. The museum will also engage community members in the design and testing of associated programs that target families and children ages 0 to 7. Museum staff will evaluate all exhibit elements to ensure they are working properly, accessible as intended, and making children’s learning visible to adult audiences.
The Thinkery will develop research-based exhibit materials and community resources to support adults as learning facilitators for their children. The museum will formalize a decade-long research relationship with a nationally recognized expert in child development and learning to establish new infrastructure and capacity to translate best practices from learning sciences into museum operations. The museum will create a 180-foot learning hub that blends elements of an exhibition and research space, allowing the prototyping and evaluation of exhibits by engaging visitors as active participants in research studies. The project team will produce bilingual exhibit prompts cards, signage, and enhancements to educate and inform parents by offering STEAM knowledge, inquiry questions, play-based learning and child development information. Additional project activities will include the development and implementation of related staff trainings and the establishment of an online parent resource gallery.
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.
The Exploratorium will increase the museum community's understanding of the impact of a single science museum visit on "emerging adult" learners-young adults aged 18-29, who are not yet married and have no children. In particular, the study will attempt to understand how museum visits help young women build crucially important science self-confidence. The project will build on prior IMLS-funded research that found that a science museum visit mitigated a pre-existing gender gap in science confidence, or self-efficacy (SSE). The research team will replicate and investigate this effect further by observing male and female young adults during their visits, and over the course of the following three months. The study will gather data before, during, and after the visit through interviews, surveys, experience-sampling, and analysis of participants' social media posts. Results of this research will provide valuable information to the science museum community, as they seek to address the challenges of achieving gender equity in STEM education and the workforce.
Over a three-year period, the Lawrence Hall of Science will conduct research on the conversations of groups and families encountering an Augmented Reality (AR) experience in a museum environment. The research program will identify which design elements best facilitate conversations among groups of visitors, and determine if these conversations are both rich in scientific content and gender-balanced. The project will focus on four specific activities: understanding the learning associated with current AR activities, implementing design-based research to develop visitor conversation supports, designing and developing new AR programs with embedded conversation supports, and conducting iterative hypothesis-based research on how learning conversations happen in AR learning environments. The museum community will gain insights on design principles for supporting collaborative learning using AR. Project staff will disseminate results via conference workshops for museum professionals on designing AR to enhance family learning, and through publication in professional journals.