The Louisiana Children’s Museum is developing a comprehensive set of resources entitled “Water Dialogues–Living with Water,” designed around its new exhibits and landscape resources, to strengthen the community’s understanding of the challenges associated with water management. They are creating a new field trip series and water-based science curriculum, “Water Pathways” as well as an outreach program, “Steward’s Ship,” to bring the program’s environmental messages to schools and camps. The museum will also conduct a professional development training series on science education for local educators implementing the state’s new science standards, in addition to a series of literacy workshops where children ages four to eight will write “how-to” books and “water journals.” To further spread the associated environmental and sustainability messages, they will organize an annual “Water Fest” program for the community.
Creative Discovery Museum (CDM) will fabricate the Little Farm House Exhibit (LFHE) for children ages 0–5 in order to offer their youngest visitors age-appropriate, hands-on, STEM-focused learning opportunities. Since access to high-quality early learning activities is important for brain development and long-term academic success, Chattanooga 2.0—the community’s initiative to transform public education—places a high priority on improving both access to and the quality of early learning environments. The museum will use various methodologies for evaluation, including time and tracking, behavior mapping, observations using an outcomes checklist, and interviews. To gain continuous feedback and input on the LFHE project, CDM leverages partnerships with multiple local organizations and an LFHE Advisory group.
The Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Garden will strengthen and expand its “Living Laboratory,” a hands-on outdoor youth environmental education program. New curricula will target students in preschool through 6th grade to expand the reach of the program. Additional programming will serve students in middle school and high school, including facilitating guided research projects for students in the district STEM Fair. Partnerships with local organizations will help to expand inclusive programming for at-risk and economically disadvantaged students and make the program free. They will use student-created videos of their experiments and activities to create multimedia online tutorial resources for educators.
The Nest: A Nature Inspired Space, Design Workshop, and Art Studio is a new project of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Museum of American Bird Art designed to provide a dedicated space and robust mobile component for pre-K to grade 5 aged children, their families, and educators. Working with community partners, the museum will create an interactive exhibition integrating nature, art, and science, using existing underutilized space at the museum. The project team will test and develop prototypes of content, materials, and equipment for the Nest, along with curriculum and programmatic activities. Through the immersive exhibition and supporting programmatic activities, the museum will better serve an expanded group of learners with nature-based STEAM programs.
This assessment serves as the summative assessment of the IMLS-funded project at KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum: Natural History Mystery: Immersing families in a problem-solving game using museum collections. The assessment employs a mixed methods approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative data are collected. More specifically, quantitative data are generated from surveys that are administered to participants at the beginning and end of the game and analyzed by using descriptive statistics (i.e., mean, standard deviation, and histogram) and paired sample t-test
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum, in collaboration with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, will develop, test, and deploy an immersive educational game on the topic of evolution and common ancestry. The museum will frame the game with a narrative that involves tracing the origin of a zoonotic disease (infectious disease that is transmitted between species from animals to humans or from humans to animals). Played on the museum floor, the escape room-inspired game will explore innovative formats for museum learning and engagement. It is being designed for families with children ages 7 to 12, and by visiting groups of schoolchildren in grades 3 to 5.
NatureStart Network brought together early childhood educators and environmental educators to support nature play, exploration, and inquiry for young children and their families within urban environments. Project partners included the Forest Preserves of Cook County and two established Head Start programs in the Chicago area, Mary Crane Center and El Valor. The foundation of the project was a series of three two-day professional learning sessions that took place over an eighteen month period. Through hands-on, collaborative learning and reflection activities, the participating educators
The Seattle Aquarium seeks to discover how toddler families experience its exhibits and how to best incorporate toddler family needs in future exhibit developments. The goal of this study is to begin to document toddler-exhibit interactions in order to better understand the Aquarium experience for that audience. The specific research goal was to determine which exhibit elements are attracting and holding the attention of the toddler family audience. A total of 47 caregiver interviews and 297 toddler observations across three exhibit areas were collected from January-March 2011 at the Seattle
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Andrea BarberKaleen PovisSeattle Aquarium