In this collaborative project, a university research lab and children's science museum work together to design, implement, study, and revise a week-long data science camp for middle school age students, data science learning assessment items and a facilitator training curriculum.
Arecibo C3 will serve as a collaborative hub for STEM discovery and exploration by building upon existing programs and opportunities established at the Arecibo site by previous NSF programs, while also creating new STEM education, research, and outreach programs and initiatives. The goals for the Center are to (1) promote STEM education, learning, and teaching; (2) support fundamental and applied STEM and STEM education research; (3) broaden participation in STEM; and (4) build and strengthen collaborations and partnerships.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jose Agosto RiveraJoseph Carroll-MirandaJaime Abreu RamosAmilcar VelezJason WilliamsCristina Fernandez-MarcoWanda Diaz MercedAnuchka RamosPatricia Ordonez
Informal STEM learning experiences (ISLEs), such as participating in science, computing, and engineering clubs and camps, have been associated with the development of youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics interests and career aspirations. However, research on ISLEs predominantly focuses on institutional settings such as museums and science centers, which are often discursively inaccessible to youth who identify with minoritized demographic groups. Using latent class analysis, we identify five general profiles (i.e., classes) of childhood participation in ISLEs from data
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Remy DouHeidi CianZahra HazariPhilip SadlerGerhard Sonnert
This paper presents synthesized research on where XR is most effective within a museum setting and what impact XR might have on the visitor experience.
The Clubhouse Network: A Global Community for Creativity and Achievement, a program of Boston's Museum of Science, will develop, pilot, and evaluate Light it Up! Engaging Young People in Digital Making Activities. Digital making activities combine design, computational thinking, and engineering practices that are all fundamental learning skills for the 21st century. Over the course of six months, the project team will develop a one-day, hands-on workshop that will give museum educators strategies to inspire a more diverse population of middle and high school-aged youth to consider educational and career pathways in STEM fields through engagement with local science centers. The workshop will be implemented twice with a group of 12 educators from regional museums. The museum will use tested evaluation tools to improve the quality and outcomes of the workshops. A successful prototype and evaluation will result in practices that can be adapted by other museums and cultural institutions to better reach young people with digital making activities.
This project investigates long-term human-robot interaction outside of controlled laboratory settings to better understand how the introduction of robots and the development of socially-aware behaviors work to transform the spaces of everyday life, including how spaces are planned and managed, used, and experienced. Focusing on tour-guiding robots in two museums, the research will produce nuanced insights into the challenges and opportunities that arise as social robots are integrated into new spaces to better inform future design, planning, and decision-making. It brings together researchers from human geography, robotics, and art to think beyond disciplinary boundaries about the possible futures of human-robot co-existence, sociality, and collaboration. Broader impacts of the project will include increased accessibility and engagement at two partner museums, interdisciplinary research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students, a short video series about the current state of robotic technology to be offered as a free educational resource, and public art exhibitions reflecting on human-robot interactions. This project will be of interest to scholars of Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography as well as museum administrators, educators and the general public.
This interdisciplinary project brings together Science and Technology Studies, Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), and human geography to explore the production of social space through emerging forms of HRI. The project broadly asks: How does the deployment of social robots influence the production of social space—including the functions, meanings, practices, and experiences of particular spaces? The project is based on long-term ethnographic observation of the development and deployment of tour-guiding robots in an art museum and an earth science museum. A social roboticist will develop a socially-aware navigation system to add nuance to the robots’ socio-spatial behavior. A digital artist will produce digital representations of the interactions that take place in the museum, using the robot’s own sensor data and other forms of motion capture. A human geographer will conduct interviews with museum visitors and staff as well as ethnographic observation of the tour-guiding robots and of the roboticists as they develop the navigation system. They will produce an ethnographic analysis of the robots’ roles in the organization of the museums, everyday practices of museum staff and visitors, and the differential experiences of the museum space. The intellectual merits of the project consist of contributions at the intersections of STS, robotics, and human geography examining the value of ethnographic research for HRI, the development of socially-aware navigation systems, the value of a socio-spatial analytic for understanding emerging forms of robotics, and the role of robots within evolving digital geographies.
This project is jointly funded by the Science and Technology Studies program in SBE and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program in EHR.
There is a national need to expand opportunities to learn coding and computational thinking in informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. These skills are increasingly needed in STEM disciplines. As young people learn to code, they engage in computational thinking concepts and practices which are problem solving strategies that include repeated process (iterative) design skills. This project promotes innovation by designing and developing activities for tinkering spaces (a space filled with materials for hands-on exploration of STEM) combined with coding in informal learning organizations such as museums, and community centers. The project supports both tinkering and making as methods to meaningfully incorporate computational thinking in STEM learning experiences. The tinkering approach to learning is characterized by hands-on, trial and error engagement. Making is similar to tinkering with additional attention to learning with peer groups. The long-term goal of the project is to enable informal educators to engage in STEM programming with youth and families from underrepresented groups. The project brings together interdisciplinary teams from the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, and the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology. In collaboration with local partner sites, the project team will design and disseminate a collection of six computational tinkering activity areas that engage learners in creative explorations using a combination of physical objects and computational code. The team will develop visual coding "microworlds" for each of the activity areas, specialized sets of coding blocks designed to provide scaffolding. Additionally, the project team will design and develop facilitation guides to document these activities and facilitation strategies, as well as workshops to better support facilitators in making and tinkering spaces.
The project enhances knowledge building through investigations of what instructional supports informal educators need to develop effective facilitation practices that engage underrepresented youth and families in STEM computational learning experiences. Study participants will include informal educators in museum, library, and community-based settings with varying backgrounds and experiences facilitating computing activities. The project team will also engage youth and families from underrepresented groups through collaborative efforts with community-based partners. Research questions include: 1) What challenges and barriers do informal learning educator, face to engage their learners in design-based activities with computing? 2) What supports informal learning educators to take on key facilitation practices that support children and families in computational tinkering activities? 3) In jointly engaging in these computational tinkering activities, how do the activities and informal learning educators? facilitation of these activities impact children's and families' development of computational tinkering and identities as creators and learners with computing? To answer these research questions the project will use qualitative ethnographic methods to study the developing interactions between learners and facilitators at three local sites. Comparative case studies of facilitators across the local partner sites will also be used to examine what supports facilitators to take on key facilitation practices. Data sources will include participant observation of facilitators and families, documentation in the form of photos, videos, and audio recordings, project artifacts, bi-monthly short surveys with reflective prompts, and interviews with facilitators and families.
This award 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.
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.
Historic art objects provide a collection of materials that have been naturally aged for decades or even centuries. In addition to the intrinsic archival value of these materials, they are also models for understanding property degradation over long periods of time. This project aims to develop computational and experimental tools needed to understand how these changes take place. To accomplish this task a research network has been established between Northwestern University and leaders in cultural heritage science from the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the National Research Council in Italy, and the Synchrotron Soleil in France. This new infrastructure promises to deliver a significant enhancement of research and education resources (networks, partnership and increased access to facilities and instrumentation) to a diverse group of users. The art objects central to the project provide a series of well-defined case studies for investigating complex materials systems that are both applicable to materials education and push the limits of the existing analytical tools, thus inspiring instrumental innovations across broad sectors of the physical sciences. Further development of these tools will enable art conservators to more effectively make informed decisions about treatments of works of art, and to understand long-term materials degradation more generally. The project will also deliver a significant enhancement of research and education infrastructure by a diverse group of users and will provide meaningful, international research experience to 50 participants, with a strong emphasis on scientists at the beginning of their careers. In addition, the connections between science and art will illustrate the creative aspects of both disciplines to a very broad audience, attracting a more representative cross section of people into science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kenneth ShullFrancesca CasadioOliver CossairtAggelos KatsaggelosMarc Walton
This guide describes what took place during NYSCI’s Big Data for Little Kids workshop series, Museum Makers: Designing With Data. In addition to detailed outlines of the activities implemented during the program, this guide includes a glossary of recurrent terms and resources used throughout the workshops.
In 2017, as part of a National Science Foundation funded project, the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) set out to teach Big Data concepts to children ages 4 – 8 years old. NYSCI developed and piloted an after-school program for families to utilize the data cycle as a method of informed