The Whaling Museum & Education Center will expand its educational programming to benefit underserved and high-risk students in grades 2 to 5, as well as their teachers and families. The museum will develop, implement, market, and evaluate core components of its programming to reach nearly 3,000 students and 50 teachers. Museum educators will present hands-on activities in nearby schools, using real and replica artifacts and other learning materials. They will also deliver workshops for teachers at the museum to help them incorporate primary resources from the museum's collection into their curricula. A family day event will showcase what students learned from the in-class visit through displays of art projects and science posters. Other project activities will include free afterschool library programs exploring STEAM and history topics and an increase in the number of scholarships to the museum's summer camp program.
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.
Development of a prototype of an immersive game set in 17th-century London that explores the relationship between science, culture, and history.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) is developing Age of Alchemy, a game exploring alchemy’s “Golden Age” in Europe during the 1600s. In this era, alchemy was not a fool’s quest for riches and eternal life: it provided economic opportunity, invited curiosity, and examined relationships between humankind and the natural world. Alchemy formed our current ideas about experimental scientific practices and paved the way for modern chemistry. It also impacted period literature, visual art, and music and continues to excite public imagination. Age of Alchemy draws on CHF’s collections of alchemical art and rare books to produce a visually rich and historically accurate experience, awakening empathy for past individuals who used experimental work to navigate society. During this prototyping phase, we will work with playtesters and our advisory team of experts to shape key game mechanics and assess levels of audience engagement and the successful communication of our humanities themes.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum (NBWM) will develop a traveling exhibition titled A Spectacle in Motion: The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World. This exhibition features one of the longest and most distinguished paintings in the United States, the 1,275’ Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World, an authentic and arresting depiction of a 19th-century whaling voyage. Painted by two New Bedford artists, the Panorama travelled the United States between the 1850s and 1870s as a moving picture show. It has not been shown in its entirety or as it was originally intended since the 1870s. The Panorama contains broad content related to history, industry, and geography, and conveys themes of globalization, cultural diversity, popular literature, and visual culture. The traveling exhibition will debut in New Bedford, MA in 2018, and then travel to Mystic, CT in late 2018. The project also includes the development of digital content and educational programs.
Production of an immersive website exploring the history, culture, and archaeology of the Giza plateau.
The Giza Project at Harvard University plans to build the full-scale version of its forthcoming public website, Digital Giza. Using the tools of the future to study the past, this free online resource will integrate diverse primary documentation from over 100 years of international archaeological research in Egypt with a scientifically-informed 3D immersive computer model of the whole Giza Plateau, including the pyramids, temples, settlements, and surrounding cemeteries. Through various “digital archaeology experiences,” visitors to the site will engage with new forms of interpretation and story-telling based on Giza materials digitally embedded and clearly contextualized in their original spatial settings. The Giza Project’s ultimate deliverable will be a powerful new online education and research tool for the world community at all levels of expertise: an interactive website and virtual environment encouraging exploration into Egyptological, historical, and broader humanities themes.
The New Jersey Historical Commission (NJHC) initiated the Understanding Communities Study with the goal to better understand how New Jersey history and history organizations can be more inclusive for all. NJHC contracted RK&A for the first phase of the study to conduct focus groups with members of Hispanic and Latino communities in New Jersey. NJHC plans to expand the study to other communities in the future. The New Jersey Center for Hispanic Policy, Research and Development served as advisors in the project.
With support from NJHC partners, RK&A conducted three focus groups with
The National Building Museum contracted RK&A to conduct an evaluation Investigating Where We Live (IWWL), a long-running program that has brought together creative youth in the Washington, D.C. area every summer since 1996 to explore, document, and interpret the local built environment. The study goal was to examine program strengths and challenges to help NBM strategically plan for the program’s future.
How did we approach this study?
To hear a variety of perspectives on the program, RK&A conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a number of stakeholders with different
This Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) project is supported by the Division of Research on Learning in the Education and Human Resources Directorate and by the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. This interdisciplinary project integrates historical insights from geometric design principles used to craft classical stringed instruments during the Renaissance era with modern insights drawn from computer science principles. The project applies abstract mathematical concepts toward the making and designing of furniture, buildings, paintings, and instruments through a specific example: the making and designing of classical stringed instruments. The research can help instrument makers employ customized software to facilitate a comparison of historical designs that draws on both geometrical proofs and evidence from art history. The project's impacts include the potential to shift in fundamental ways not only how makers think about design and the process of making but also how computer scientists use foundational concepts from programming languages to inform the representation of physical objects. Furthermore, this project develops an alternate teaching method to help students understand mathematics in creative ways and offers specific guidance to current luthiers in areas such as designing the physical structure of a stringed instrument to improve acoustical effect.
The project develops a domain-specific functional programming language based on straight-edge and compass constructions and applies it in three complementary directions. The first direction develops software tools (compilers) to inform the construction of classical stringed instruments based on geometric design principles applied during the Renaissance era. The second direction develops an analytical and computational understanding of the art history of these instruments and explores extensions to other maker domains. The third direction uses this domain-specific language to design an educational software tool. The tool uses a calculative and constructive method to teach Euclidean geometry at the pre-college level and complements the traditional algebraic, proof-based teaching method. The representation of instrument forms by high-level programming abstractions also facilitates their manufacture, with particular focus on the arching of the front and back carved plates --- of considerable acoustic significance --- through the use of computer numerically controlled (CNC) methods. The project's novelties include the domain-specific language itself, which is a programmable form of synthetic geometry, largely without numbers; its application within the contemporary process of violin making and in other maker domains; its use as a foundation for a computational art history, providing analytical insights into the evolution of classical stringed instrument design and its related material culture; and as a constructional, computational approach to teaching geometry.
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.
Summative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. Formative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. This study examined how effective a series of "Community Conversations" theater and dialogue/discussion events was at a) communicating natural gas development-related science content and community issues, and b) promoting audience members' openness to dialogue about natural gas development-related issues.
The Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in collaboration with EcoArts Connections and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is conducting an initial planning workshop and related activities which will be the first of three stepwise convenings over the next two or three years to gather experts from the fields of natural and social sciences, arts, energy/water conservation, and related disciplines. The initiative will work to establish an operational strategy for knowledge sharing across collaborating entities, networks, and associations. The major goal is to strengthen collaboration of professionals nationally to better conceive, conduct, and evaluate projects for the public that work at the intersection of science, arts, and sustainability (environmental, social and economic). Many communities around the country have been seeking to address increasingly pressing problems about their ability to sustain the vitality, health and resilience of their regions and the lives of their residents. Bringing inter-disciplinary knowledge and skills to bear on these issues is considered to be critical. Between 24 - 32 professionals will be involved. The workshop will be conducted simultaneously in Boulder, CO and at Princeton University, with communication between the two sites. 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 understandings of deeper learning by participants. Intended outcomes from this first workshop include: 1) identification and preliminary mapping of successful evidence-based best practices in science-arts-sustainability collaborations 2) a strategic vision for interdisciplinary collaboration across networks; and 3) an initial framework for the dissemination of findings that can reach across disciplines. Outputs include 1) preparation of a pre-workshop briefing booklet based in part on interviews of professionals in the various disciplines; 2) a post-workshop white paper; 3) a network of experts from the participating disciplinary fields; and 4) an agenda for the second (larger) convening. The trans-disciplinary strategy promises to more efficiently and effectively bring STEM disciplines to a wider public in collaboration with the arts through sustainability topics that are place-based, targeted to, and meaningful for specific audiences.