Production of an augmented reality app for the Cahokia Mounds historic site and a complementary website.
This project is to produce an augmented reality application for Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. This experience will enable visitors to see structures, people, and other features of this ancient site through the lens of their smartphone or tablet. There will be extra audio and vision opportunities loaded to the experience as well as a complementary website. The website will include curriculum for school use. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is a UNESCO World Heritage and US National Historic Landmark. This project will greatly enhance the visitor's experience and bring awareness of the site.
Purpose: In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress only 17% of 8th grade students performed at or above the proficient level in U.S. history. One way to engage students in learning history is to create history learning resources that are designed to be relevant and appealing to young people's interests and regular activities. Surveys find that almost all teenage boys and girls play digital games, and the majority of teens play daily. This project will leverage the potential of games and technology to engage students and increase history skills and content knowledge.
Project Activities: The team, consisting of graphic artists, content specialists, computer scientists, and programmers, will initially create wireframes and a functional game prototype. Following feedback from a group of students and teachers on the user-interface, the team will produce an online tablet app. Iterative refinements will be conducted at major production milestones until the intervention is fully functional. Once development is complete, the researchers will assess the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the product to improve outcomes in a pilot study. The study will include 200 8th grade students in eight classrooms. Four classrooms will be assigned to play to game as part of the curriculum over three to five class periods, and four classrooms will be taught the same historical content using the business as usual curriculum without the game. Each group will complete pre- and post- assessments to assess differences in history knowledge and skills.
Product: This project team will develop a tablet-based interactive role-playing game that immerses 5th through 9th grade students in the history of the Great Depression. The game will provide players an experiential understanding of the hardships that beset Americans in the 1930s and their strategies for survival, as individuals and as a nation. Features of the game will include story-based immersive narrative missions where student's decisions continually drive the action, tips and hints for students who are struggling in the game, writing tools, and interactive maps. The game will can be integrated within a course or used as a supplement. A teacher dashboard will be developed to facilitate the use of the game within classroom settings. Finally, the final product will include upgrades to existing games, including City of Immigrants and the The Hardest Times. The upgrades will publish these games to tablets and will include deeper in-game assessment opportunities.
Purpose: There is concern about a decline in mathematics achievement scores among U.S. students during the middle school years. For example, while 4th grade U.S. students rank 8th overall on an international mathematics comparison, by 10th grade U.S. student's drop significantly to 25th in the same comparison. Some researchers posit that much of this decline relates to how math is taught in the U.S. and with how students become less engaged as learners in middle school. The purpose of this project is to develop a web-based game to engage 7h grade students in a narrative-based story which will apply learning of content and skills aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in mathematics.
Project Activities: During Phase I in 2012, the team developed a functioning prototype and conducted usability and feasibility research with fourteen 7th grade students. Researchers found that the prototype functioned as intended and that students were highly engaged while playing the game. In Phase II, the team will develop a fully-functional user interface with animated characters, interactivity across student users, narrative scripts and accompanying art assets, 36 problem sets, and student and teacher dashboards and databases. After development is complete, a pilot study will examine the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the game to improve math learning. The study will include 120 students in 6 classrooms in three schools, with one classroom per school randomly assigned to use the game and the other half assigned to a business-as-usual control. Analyses will compare student scores on pre and post mathematics measures.
Product: Empires is a web-based game that addresses 36 pre-algebra Common Core State Standards in mathematics for 7th and 8th grades. The game follows a storyline in a recreation of an ancient empire which is at the brink of agricultural revolution and of becoming a trade economy. As students play the game, they engage in math-focused activities to drive the action, such as taxing citizens to learn ratios and proportions, allocating resources to learn percentages, and measuring the distance and time between a neighboring empire by applying the principles of the Pythagorean Theorem. As a socially networked game, students will interact with other students in the class to complete trades that lead to encounters with different math problems. The game will include two helpful, funny, advisors who will scaffold learning through mathematical discourse, arguing over the next most important thing to do. The game design architecture will work on a wide range of computers, including desktops and iPads. A teacher's guide and companion website will provide guidance to classroom activities that complement the game.
In prior research and development (in part supported by a 2014 ED/IES SBIR award), the project team developed Mission U.S., a series of web- and app-based games for topics in U.S. history. With this Phase I funding, the team will extend Mission U.S. by developing and testing a prototype of a virtual reality (VR) platform to immerse students in transformational moments in U.S history and to guide document-based investigations. The prototype of Mission U.S.: Time Snap will consist of VR goggles that present history content, and a website to host mission briefs to prepare student inquiry, worksheets to facilitate reflection, and an embedded assessment. At the end of Phase I in a pilot study with 30 students in one classroom, the researchers will examine whether the VR platform and the website function as planned, if students are engaged with the system, and whether student content knowledge of a historical event improves from pre- to post-test.
This paper provides an analysis of the implementation and the outcomes of Scienza Attiva, an Italian national project for secondary school students, that makes use of deliberative democracy tools to address socio-scientific issues of great impact. The analysis has required a mixed method including surveys of students' pre- and post-project opinions, focus groups and interviews with students and teachers. The results from this evaluation study provide evidence that the project improves students' understanding of socio-scientific issues, strengthens their awareness of the importance of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Federica CornaliGianfranco PomattoSelena Agnella
The importance the Brazilian government has given in the last few years to the dissemination of science points out the necessity of a more discerning analysis about the establishment of this subject on the public agenda and the related public policies undertaken. This work tries to contribute to the debate as an inquiry about the policies to popularize and disseminate Science and Technology (S&T) established by the Science and Technology Popularization and Dissemination Department, which was created in 2004. In order to do so, theoretical references from Public Policy Analysis, the Studies of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marcia Tait LimaEdnalva Felix das NevesRenato Peixoto Dagnino
The idea to link European citizenship and science education is surely new and uncommon in Poland, but we think, as SEDEC project, that can enrich both the panorama of science popularization outside and inside school system. I checked carefully curricula for every stage of school education looking for the topics concerning the developing of the European citizenship. I found that they are usually connected to the history, geography and some activities developing of the knowledge about generally defined citizenship. The spare topics connected directly to the science are present especially in
In the course of the last decade the European debate on the concept of citizenship has shown that a definition of this concept in strictly legal and jurisprudence terms is reductive. Indeed a behavioral element is present, which goes beyond the defence and request for defence of rights and duties, but actually stresses the importance of acting within a community (or within several communities). A citizenship belonging to a given space/time context which, to be authentic, requires know-how and know-how-to-be that can be gained in different training opportunities (formal, informal etc.) with
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and The Watermen's Museum, Yorktown, VA, will produce an underwater robotics research and discovery education program in conjunction with time-sensitive, underwater archeological research exploring recently discovered shipwrecks of General Cornwallis's lost fleet in the York River. The urgency of the scientific research is based upon the dynamic environment of the York River with its strong tidal currents, low visibility, and seasonal hypoxia that can rapidly deteriorate the ships, which have been underwater since 1781. Geophysical experts believe that further erosion is likely once the wrecks are exposed. Given the unknown deterioration rate of the shipwrecks coupled with the constraints of implementing the project during the 2011-2012 school-year, any delays would put the scientific research back at least 18 months - a potentially devastating delay for documenting the ships. The monitoring and studying of the historic ships will be conducted by elementary through high school-aged participants and their teachers who will collect the data underwater through robotic missions using VideoRay Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and a Fetch Automated Underwater Vehicle (AUV) from a command station at The Watermen's Museum. Students and teachers will be introduced to the science, mathematics, and integrated technologies associated with robotic underwater research and will experience events that occur on a real expedition, including mission planning, execution, monitoring, and data analysis. Robotic missions will be conducted within the unique, underwater setting of the historical shipwrecks. Such research experiences and professional development are intended to serve as a key to stimulating student interest in underwater archeological research, the marine environment and ocean science, advanced research using new technologies, and the array of opportunities presented for scientific and creative problem solving associated with underwater research. A comprehensive, outcomes-based formative and summative, external evaluation of the project will be conducted by Dr. L. Art Safer, Loyola University. The evaluation will inform the project's implementation efforts and investigate the project's impact. The newly formed partnership between the Waterman's Museum and VIMS will expand the ISE Program's objectives to forge new partnerships among informal venues, and to expand the use of advanced technologies for informal STEM learning. Extensive public dissemination during and after the project duration, includes but is not limited to, hosting an "Expedition to the Wrecks" web portal on the VIMS BRIDGE site for K-12 educators providing real-time results of the project and live webcasts. The website will be linked to the education portal at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the world's largest organization devoted to promoting unmanned systems and to the FIRST Robotics community through the Virginia portal. The website will be promoted through scientific societies, the National Marine Educators Association, National Science Teachers Association, and ASTC. Links will be provided to the Center for Archeological Research at the College of William and Mary and the Immersion Presents web portal--consultants to Dr. Bob Ballard's K-12 projects and JASON explorations. The NPS Colonial National Historic Park and the Riverwalk Landing will create public exhibits about the shipwreck's archeological and scientific significance, and will provide live observation of the research and the exploration technologies employed in this effort.
The Flathead Community of Resource Educators (CORE) is a consortium of educators in the Flathead Watershed. They produced the Flathead Watershed Sourcebook as a tool to increase understanding and appreciation of the region. The objective of this project is to produce a curriculum guide to accompany the Sourcebook. This curriculum project will be carried out by a team of experts in interdisciplinary teacher education from Montana State University. The project will be conducted in four phases and include the guidance and feedback of Scientists, Educators, and Resource Managers living and working within the Flathead watershed.
This two-year project is communicating the results of scientific discoveries produced by an on-going LTER (Long-term Ecological Research) project devoted to understanding the Everglades ecosystem. Specifically, Dr. Heithaus is capitalizing on the discoveries funded through 0620409 (Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystems Research) about the role of large-bodied, top predators in the Everglades, including bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) and American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis). The STEM content of this project is biology, in particular ecology, the environment, and conservation. These results are being communicated via: (1) multimedia exhibit presentations at multiple museums and nature centers in southern Florida, primarily the Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS), located in Ft. Lauderdale near the Everglades and (2) online dissemination of mini-documentaries and other educational components at social media websites and the LTER web site. The target audience for the museum exhibit components includes learners from diverse cultural backgrounds, such as urban family groups reflecting the demographics of southern Florida. This project will also develop a documentary about Everglades ecology that is planned for dissemination on a cable TV channel devoted to natural history. In order to link with formal education, related educational deliverables are being produced for use in science classroom settings (grades 4 through 12) that are aligned with the state science standards and benchmarks. Formative assessment conducted by museum staff and university students will evaluate learning outcomes as they relate to STEM content learning goals. After the two-year funding period, the science learning opportunities produced from the current Communicating Research to Public Audiences (CRPA) project will be sustained as the exhibit travels to other venues and as web deliverables are accessed on-line.
The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) will develop Window on Catalhoyuk: An Archaeological Work in Progress. The project will include a 4,500 sq. ft. exhibit, a World Wide Web site, an exhibit cookbook for archaeology interactives developed for the exhibit, and a suite of related classroom activities. Catalhoyuk is currently the most important archaeological site in Turkey and among the most significant cultural heritage monuments in the world. It consists of two mounds located on either side of an ancient river channel. The larger mound has Early Neolithic age occupation levels (9000 and 7500 years ago) and represents one of the largest known Neolithic settlements, holding links to the beginnings of agriculture, animal domestication, and the rise of urban complexity. The smaller mound consists of more recent occupations (7500 to 5000 years ago). Together they may record nearly 10,000 years of human occupation. SMM has been a partner, along with the Turkish team, in the Catalhoyuk Research Project since its inception in 1993 and has the responsibility of developing public programs and for bringing the research findings before a worldwide audience. Unlike a traditional approach where the results of archaeological research appear years after the excavations, this project will focus on the process of archaeology giving visitors the opportunity of learning about the workings of contemporary archaeology and the nature of scientific inquiry, along with the important insight into the beginning of Mediterranean civilization. The exhibit will be updated annually for two years to reflect new results of ongoing fieldwork. The project addresses the National Science Education Standards, particularly those related to science as inquiry and to the history and nature of science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Donald PohlmanNatalie RuskOrrin Shane