The Dynamic Earth: You Have To See it To Believe It is a public exhibition and suite of programming designed to educate and excite K-8 students, teachers, and families about weather and climate science, plate tectonics, erosion, and stream formation. The Dynamic Earth program draws attention to the importance of large-scale earth processes and the human impacts on these processes, utilizing real artifacts, hands-on models, and NASA earth imagery and data. The program includes the exhibition, student workshops, family workshops, annual professional development opportunities for classroom teachers, innovative theater shows, lectures for adults by visiting scientists, and interpretive activities. The Montshire Museum of Science has partnered with Chabot Space and Science Center (CA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (NH) on various components. The project has broadened our internal capacity for providing quality earth science programming by greatly expanding our program titles and allowing us to create hands-on materials for use by our educators and to loan to schools in our Partnership Initiative. Programming developed during the grant period continues to reach thousands of students and teachers each year, both on-site and as part of our rural outreach efforts.
Presentation on NSF grant DRL-1114568 (""Fusion Science Theater National Training and Dissemination Program"") presented at the CAISE Convening on Professional Development and Informal Science Education, February 2nd, 2012.
The Maryland Science Center, in partnership with SK Films, Inc. received NSF funding to produce a large format, 2D/3D film and multi-component educational materials and activities on the annual migration of monarch butterflies, their life cycle, the web of life at select sites where they land, and the citizen science efforts that led to the monarch migration discovery. Project goals are to 1) raise audience understanding of the nature of scientific investigation and the open-ended nature of the scientific process, 2) enhance and extend citizen science programs to new audiences, and 3) create better awareness of monarch biology, insect ecology and the importance of habitat. Innovation/Strategic Impact: The film has been released in both 3D and 2D 15/70 format. RMC Research Corporation has conducted evaluation of the project, both formatively and summatively, including a study of the comparable strengths of the 2D and 3D versions of the film. RMC has conducting formative evaluation and is currently conducting summative evaluation to assess the success of project materials in communicating science and achieving the project's learning goals. Collaboration: This project employs a collaborative model of partnerships between the project team and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the University of Minnesota's Monarchs in the Classroom and Monarch Watch. Project advisors represent world-renown monarch butterfly research scientists and educators, including Dr. Karen Oberhauser, named a "Champion of Change" by President Obama in June 2013, and Dr. Chip Taylor, founder and director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas.
The Fusion Science Theater National Training and Dissemination Program builds on the success of the Fusion Science Theater (FST) planning grant (DRL 07-32142). Madison Area Technical College, in collaboration with the Institute for Chemical Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the American Chemical Society (ACS) and area science centers and museums will create a national program to disseminate the FST model which directly engages children in playful, participatory, and inquiry-based science learning of chemistry and physics topics. The primary target audience is children aged 4-11, while undergraduate chemistry students, faculty, and formal and informal educators comprise the secondary professional audience. The project will result in the development of a robust, creative, and highly visible national dissemination program. The National Training and Dissemination Program includes three deliverables. First, a Distance Performance Training Program will be developed to teach groups of undergraduate students, faculty, and educators how to perform FST Science Investigation (SI) Shows. The Training Program includes a Performance Training Package and a 3-day Performance Training Workshop. The Performance Training Package will be comprised of training videos, performances videos, scripts, rehearsal schedules, and training exercises. These materials will be pilot tested while training representatives of five groups from around the country to perform SI Shows during the Performance Training Workshop at Madison Area Technical College in summer 2012. Participants will be selected from ACS undergraduate groups, outreach specialists, and museum professionals. Workshop participants then return to their home institutions and lead their groups through the improved Performance Training Package delivered via Moodle, with support from FST team members and social networking tools. The second deliverable is the FST Methods Workshop. The Methods Workshop is designed to teach formal and informal educators to use selected methods (Investigation Question, Embedded Assessment, and Act-It-Out) in their outreach efforts and classroom teaching. Four workshops will be presented at national meetings and at the invitation of colleges, universities, and science centers. Follow-up with workshop participants will be mediated through an online forum to encourage experimentation, modification, and dissemination of a second generation of FST activities. The final project deliverable is the development and implementation of a Promotion and Recruitment Plan to connect professional audiences with FST. The Distance Performance Training Program and workshops will be evaluated using mixed methods, while embedded assessment will be utilized to measure the impact on youth participants attending SI shows to determine the overall effectiveness the Distance Performance Training. This project is designed to have important impacts on STEM education and society. The proposed dissemination program brings innovative models and methods into the hands of informal science education practitioners who can use them to engage local audiences and enhance their own teaching and communication practices. Finally the project offers likely benefits for society through the creation and dissemination of innovative practices to combat science illiteracy, diminishing pools of scientists and engineers, lack of understanding about the nature of science, and the achievement gap that exacerbates these problems. This project could be transformative in informal science education as SI Shows use theater to engage audiences in multiple aspects of science learning. It is anticipated that this project will reach up to 2,500 individuals in public and professional audiences.
This project will introduce students ages 8-14, including underserved students; their teachers and families; and the general public to three biomedical research areas inspired by NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research: biological pathways, bioinformatics and nanomedicine. These areas are unfamiliar to many adults and are not introduced in science curricula. Using the metaphor of a hardware store (i.e., building materials, tools, parts, home repair projects), the project will introduce families, students and teachers to three ideas: (1) The body maintains and repairs itself at the molecular, cell, tissue, organ and system levels; (2) Biomedical researchers are uncovering new complexities at the molecular level that can increase our understanding of how the body works; and (3) Developments in nanomedicine can lead to discoveries and treatments. In a hardware store theater and workshop space and in a virtual hardware store, the project will develop and present demonstrations and basic- and intermediate-level labs (for 2nd- and 6th-grade students or families); train museum staff and interns to present the programs; offer orientation workshops to teachers from Title I schools; develop a teacher's guide; conduct outreach in middle schools; engage scientists to talk about their work and help them communicate with the public; and create a manual of materials and activities for other science centers. The evaluation plan will include formative research on activities and assessment of how well repair metaphors facilitate understanding of clinical issues. A team of scientists, museum staff, science teachers, and biology and medical students will guide the development of education components.