This guide gathers the ultimate reflections from the Erasmus+ project "Tinkering EU: Addressing the Adults." It was created for science centers, museums and other places of science education interested in exploring the potential of Tinkering for inclusive learning and engagement. It presents lessons learned about:
The co-design and the development of the activities.
Relevant elements to consider building meaningful relationships with the local communities.
The contribution the project has given to each partner’s institutional change at a wider level.
An interactive online
A practical guide containing descriptions of 11 Tinkering activities for adult learners. It can be used by community development and informal learning practitioners working with adult groups. Some of the activities were newly developed while others were adjusted from already existing and tested activities. Special focus is given to activities suitable for adults from different backgrounds, taking into account different needs, interests and motivations. This publication is a product of Tinkering EU: Addressing the Adults, funded with support from the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
This project continues the work of "Tinkering EU: Contemporary Education for Innovators of Tomorrow" that introduced Tinkering methodology in Europe. It also builds upon the work of "Tinkering EU: Building Science Capital for ALL" that explored Tinkering and Science Capital with a specific focus on teachers and students from disadvantaged communities. "Tinkering EU: Addressing the Adults" focusses on fostering the socio-educational and personal development of adults.
Tinkering, inspired by the USA-based experience of the Exploratorium of San Francisco, is proven to be a powerful tool that contributes to the improvement of key competences and skills, and connects science knowledge and skills with the requirements of the contemporary labour market.
The project aims to foster the socio-educational and personal development of adults, as well as their participation in civic and social life, focusing on the following priorities:
Stronger science engagement
Need for 21st Century skills
Low science capital
Coordinator: NEMO Science Museum - The Netherlands
Partners:
National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci – Italy
University of Cambridge – UK
Science Center Network – Austria
Traces – France
Centrum Nauki Kopernik – Poland
This document is aimed primarily at Informal Learning (IFL) educators working with adult learners from disadvantaged and underserved communities, who wish to:
exploit the inclusive nature of Tinkering to create engaging and relevant STEM learning experiences for adult learners and their families
better understand how and why collaboration and co-design with community organisations can help develop more inclusive programming in STEM learning for adults.
It can also serve as a useful reference for community leaders and adult educators wishing to collaborate with the IFL sector
Makerspaces are learning environments that engage participants in authentic science and engineering practices, using hands-on and collaborative approaches to support activities and projects that foster creativity, interest, and skill development. Recently there has been a rapid growth of makerspaces in schools and in informal places like museums, libraries, and community centers. However, many of these spaces are not accessible to all members of society. This project will produce a model for a STEM makerspace that focuses on increasing access. The model has four critical components that operate together: affordable housing, informal STEM learning, maker education, and multi-generational learning. This project will develop and study the community-based, multigenerational makerspace model for Bayview Towers, a 200-unit affordable housing complex in Connecticut. The Multi-Gen STEM Makerspaces project brings together CAST, a non-profit education research organization, the NHP Foundation/Operation Pathways, a national affordable housing provider, and the Boston University Social Learning Lab, which researches the social context for STEM learning. The project will produce a Multi-Gen Maker Playbook comprised of an educational guide for a series of four-week workshops around different themes and modes of making. The Playbook will also serve as a program model that guides similar communities on how to create and run sustainable and thriving maker programs of their own. Families in the Bayview Towers community will build an understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts through participation in an onsite makerspace. Families will relate what they are doing through making to longer-term goals connected to STEM learning, education, and careers. The project will also enable the engagement of individuals in the co-design (individuals provide creative contributions) of making that can be translated into community structures and values that support a sustainable makerspace. The affordable housing context will provide understanding of individual and other social factors that impact learners' sense of STEM identity. The project will support mobility from poverty by including STEM learning as part of the resident services.
The research will examine how low income communities access, engage, and learn in makerspaces, and relate their learning to relevant goals. The team will use design-based research (DBR) whereby participants and researchers work together to design interventions intended to explore theory through cycles of enactment, analysis, and revision. The DBR research will answer the following questions:
In what ways, if any, does the model support residents experiencing STEM learning as consequential?
What kind of making goals do residents set and how do they embed STEM in these goals?
If residents experience STEM learning as consequential through the workshops, do they also see the relationship between their making goals and longer term goals?
Do those residents that use the makerspace more frequently experience more positive outcomes in terms of consequential STEM learning?
How do the various makerspace structures - training of facilitators, dedicated space and equipment, Playbook - support the model?
Are groups of residents participating regularly in the makerspace and if so, who is in these groups? Do these groups start to identify as a maker community? Is the community finding the makerspace of value?
In what ways does the organization and operations of the makerspace support building a sustainable model for multigenerational and consequential learning?
Participants will include 90 youth and 90 adults from the resident community at Bayview Towers. Research data to be collected includes open-ended response measures for scoring residents' interpretation, analysis and understanding of each workshop elements. Also, interview protocols will be used to guide the refinement of the Multi-Gen Maker Playbook features and analyze usability, feasibility, engagement and user experience of the Multi-Gen Maker Playbook within the platform. The program will use semi-structured interview protocols on participants' goals and STEM identity and focus group protocols on community maker values and makerspace structures. Additionally, a Likert-style survey on STEM identity will also be adapted from the Science Identity Scale. Project evaluation will examine the overall achievement of program goals and objectives. Project results will be communicated by traditional means of dissemination to scholars and practitioners. The team will also create targeted digital media, including online articles, podcast interviews, and blog posts, to reach a broader audience.
This Innovations in Development 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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sam Catherine JohnstonKathleen CorriveauJess GropenKim DucharmeKenneth White
Tinkering is an approach to learning increasingly adopted within informal learning settings to engage people with STEM learning (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). It builds on ideas in inquiry-based pedagogy and exploits some of the most engaging and motivational elements of learner-centered, immersive and hands-on learning approaches to develop 21st century skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, communication, responsibility, self-confidence, digital literacy and entrepreneurship. In a Tinkering activity, the learner is presented with
Participants in this study reported a variety of resources used in the past to learn to code in Apex, including online tutorials, one-day classes sponsored by Salesforce, and meet-up groups focused on learning. They reported various difficulties in learning through these resources, including what they viewed as the gendered nature of classes where the men already seemed to know how to code—which set a fast pace for the class, difficulty in knowing “where to start” in their learning, and a lack of time to practice learning due to work and family responsibilities. The Coaching and Learning Group
While prior research has explored the reasons adults seek learning opportunities, little is known about the factors that moderate older adults' desire to participate in particular learning experiences. This study will contribute to understanding strategies that engage older adults in STEM learning in informal settings. The specific informal STEM Learning (ISL) experience to be studied here involves the innovative use of a carefully structured multigenerational team engineering design challenge that incorporates the engineering design process, recognized as integrative approach to STEM. The project will develop and pilot new tools to measure the impacts of the ISL experience on older adults. The work will ultimately generate new knowledge that supports general measurement practices through the rigorous, systematic development of measures of older adult learning.
During the 18-month pilot study, the team will: (a) develop and test methods for measuring engagement in informal STEM learning and STEM advocacy in adults 50+ years of age; and (b) explore factors that lead to the engagement of this population in ISL and that moderate the outcome of enhanced STEM advocacy. For research purposes, engagement is being defined as focus, participation, and persistence on a task. STEM advocacy is defined as a stance toward personal actions that supports or promotes a cause or policy. The study design includes use of an intergenerational team engineering design challenge involving 48 older adults as the focal ISL activity of the research. Findings from this pilot study will inform a future large-scale study of ISL environments, including specific instructional practices and resulting outcomes, for older adult learning. Defining the construct of STEM advocacy and examining its validity as a potentially measurable outcome will better position the field to design and evaluate more effective older adult learning experiences.
Project results will be disseminated widely through the literature on ISL, adult education and research tool development, as well as existing practitioner networks. The project's connection with networks of lifelong learning institutes creates additional infrastructure opportunities for ISL experiences, including the broader use of intergenerational learning methods and informal STEM design challenges. This Pilot & Feasibility study 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.
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.
Ideas from social justice can help us understand how equity issues are woven through out-of-school science learning practices. In this paper, I outline how social justice theories, in combination with the concepts of infrastructure access, literacies and community acceptance, can be used to think about equity in out-of-school science learning. I apply these ideas to out-of-school science learning via television, science clubs and maker spaces, looking at research as well as illustrative examples to see how equity challenges are being addressed in practice. I argue that out-of-school science
In this chapter, we explore making as a learning process in the context of a museum-based maker space designed for family participation. In particular, we focus on young children, and their adult learning partners, as an important demographic to consider and for which to design making environments and experiences. Importantly, we take a close look at the evolving role of museum educators in supporting young children's meaningful participation in making as an informal learning process. Through the presentation of a single case of a child's making in the museum, we identify key factors that
This Research in Service to Practice project, a collaboration of Pepperdine University and the New York Hall of Science, will establish a network of STEM-related Media Making Clubs comprised of after-school students aged 12 - 19 and teachers in the U.S. and in three other countries: Kenya, Namibia and Finland. The media produced by the students may include a range of formats such as videos, short subject films, games, computer programs and specialized applications like interactive books. The content of the media produced by the students will focus on the illustration and teaching of STEM topics, where the shared media is intended to help other students become enthused about and learn the science. This proposal builds on the principal investigator's previous work on localized media clubs by now creating an international network in which after-school students and teachers will collaborate at a distance with other clubs. The central research questions for the project pertain to three themes at the intersection of learning, culture and collaboration: the impact of participatory teaching, virtual networks, and intercultural, global competence. The research will combine qualitative, cross-cultural and big data methods. Critical to the innovation of the project, the research team will also develop a network assessment tool, adapting epistemic network analysis methods to the needs of this initiative. This work 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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Eric HamiltonKatherine McMillanPriya Mohabir
This report summarizes evaluative findings from a project titled “What Curiosity Sounds Like: Discovering, Challenging, and Sharing Scientific Ideas” (a.k.a.: “Discovery Dialogues”). The project, a Full-Scale development project funded by the National Science Foundation as part of its Advancing Informal Science Learning (AISL) program, explored new ways to actively engage both lay and professional audiences, and foster meaningful communication between scientists and the general public. Appendix includes survey and interview questions.