This document is the final evaluation report for the project, which focuses both on formative evaluation of the collaborative+interdisciplinary presentation creation process and summative evaluation of audience learning outcomes.
The linked repository contains select resources from the SICIIT NSF project (Supporting Science and Engineering Identity Change in Immersive Interactive Technologies). The project did not reach its main objective, mainly due to disruptions caused by COVID, but we hope that the materials will be a useful resource for follow-up research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Stefan RankAyana AllenGlen MuschioAroutis FosterKapil Dandekar
Development of a prototype of an immersive game set in 17th-century London that explores the relationship between science, culture, and history.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) is developing Age of Alchemy, a game exploring alchemy’s “Golden Age” in Europe during the 1600s. In this era, alchemy was not a fool’s quest for riches and eternal life: it provided economic opportunity, invited curiosity, and examined relationships between humankind and the natural world. Alchemy formed our current ideas about experimental scientific practices and paved the way for modern chemistry. It also impacted period literature, visual art, and music and continues to excite public imagination. Age of Alchemy draws on CHF’s collections of alchemical art and rare books to produce a visually rich and historically accurate experience, awakening empathy for past individuals who used experimental work to navigate society. During this prototyping phase, we will work with playtesters and our advisory team of experts to shape key game mechanics and assess levels of audience engagement and the successful communication of our humanities themes.
Production of an immersive website exploring the history, culture, and archaeology of the Giza plateau.
The Giza Project at Harvard University plans to build the full-scale version of its forthcoming public website, Digital Giza. Using the tools of the future to study the past, this free online resource will integrate diverse primary documentation from over 100 years of international archaeological research in Egypt with a scientifically-informed 3D immersive computer model of the whole Giza Plateau, including the pyramids, temples, settlements, and surrounding cemeteries. Through various “digital archaeology experiences,” visitors to the site will engage with new forms of interpretation and story-telling based on Giza materials digitally embedded and clearly contextualized in their original spatial settings. The Giza Project’s ultimate deliverable will be a powerful new online education and research tool for the world community at all levels of expertise: an interactive website and virtual environment encouraging exploration into Egyptological, historical, and broader humanities themes.
This project, a collaboration of teams at Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and the Museum of Design Atlanta and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, will investigate how to foster engagement and broadening participation in computing by audiences in museums and other informal learning environments that can transfer to at-home and in-school engagement (and vice versa). The project seeks to address the national need to make major strides in developing computing literacy as a core 21st century STEM skill. The project will adapt and expand to new venues their current work on their EarSketch system which connects computer programming concepts to music remixing, i.e. the manipulation of musical samples, beats and effects. The initiative involves a four-year process of iteratively designing and developing a tangible programming environment based on the EarSketch learning environment. The team will develop three new applications: TuneTable, a multi-user tabletop exhibit for museums; TunePad, a smaller version for use at home and in schools; and an online connection between the earlier EarSketch program and the two new devices.
The goal is to: a) engage museum learners in collaborative, playful programming experiences that create music; b) direct museum learners to further learning and computational music experiences online with the EarSketch learning environment; c) attract EarSketch learners from local area schools to visit the museum and interact with novice TuneTable users, either as mentors in museum workshops or museum guests; and d) inform the development of a smaller scale, affordable tangible-based experience that could be used at homes or in smaller educational settings, such as classrooms and community centers. In addition to the development of new learning experiences, the project will test the hypothesis that creative, playful, and social engagement in the arts with computer programming across multiple settings (e.g. museums, homes, and classrooms) can encourage: a) deeper learner involvement in computer programming, b) social connections to other learners, c) positive attitudes towards computing, and d) the use and recognition of computational concepts for personal expression in music. The project's knowledge-building efforts include research on four major questions related to the goals and evaluation processes conducted by SageFox on the fidelity of implementation, impact, success of the exhibits, and success of bridging contexts. Methods will draw on the Active Prolonged Engagement approach (unobtrusive observation, interviews, tracking-and-timing, data summaries and team debriefs) as well as Participatory Action Research methods.
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:
Michael HornBrian MagerkoJason Freeman
This will be a unique video game based on the writings the American author Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Designed and directed by game designer Tracy Fullerton, Walden, a game, will simulate the experiment in living made by Thoreau at Walden Pond in 1845-47, allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the game play their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there. The humanities content of the game will focus on an interactive translation of Thoreau’s writings and will also include references to the historical context of those writings. The game takes place in the environment of 1845 New England, when new technologies such as the railroad, the telegraph were first being seen and were part of the changes to pace of life that Thoreau so articulately resisted in critiques of society.
The availability of mobile and stationary devices opens up new challenges to support users in several contexts. Here we present a multi-device environment to support cooperation among museum visitors through games. In particular, we present a design and the associated implementation for using a combination of PDAs and public displays to enhance the learning experience in a museum setting by using game playing interactions. The basic assumption is to use the mobile devices for individual game play, and the situated displays for synchronized public views of shared game play; the individual game
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Riccardo DiniFabio PaternoCarmen Santoro
There is a growing commitment within science centres and museums to deploy computer-based exhibits to enhance participation and engage visitors with socio-scientific issues. As yet however, we have little understanding of the interaction and communication that arises with and around these forms of exhibits, and the extent to which they do indeed facilitate engagement. In this paper, we examine the use of novel computer-based exhibits to explore how people, both alone and with others, interact with and around installations. The data are drawn from video-based field studies of the conduct and
The drawing of 'outlines' can be shown to be dependent upon the bounding edge aspect of visual cognition, which is a principal means of discerning 'identity' from other features of experience in the visual field. Visual 'signatures' can be noticed when using techniques for the scientific visualization of data. Using examples from an ongoing art-science project between the Faculty of Arts and Architecture (Brighton) and the Meteorology Dept at the University of Reading, the paper will explore the boundary between the 'rational' and the subjective, and between the representation of knowledge and
The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), as an active cultural promoter, implemented a virtual museum system in order to help and develop expression related to art, science and humanities. The UNAM's cultural heritage is, as in many other universities, a vast number of different kinds of objects, ranging from painting and sculpture to numismatics and architecture, from traditional art to modern multimedia-based exhibits to Scientific Collections. It is impossible to exhibit it all in a single place in an orderly fashion. The Virtual Museum of the University's Cultural Heritage
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Francisco CaviedesEsther de la HerranAndrea VitelaA. Libia CervantesJose MondragonAlma RangelJose SilvaIldiko PelczerFrancisco SalgadoAdidier Perez-GomezCarolina Flores-IllescasJose CasillasGraciela de la TorreJorge ReynosoRafael SamanoJulia MolinarJose Manuel MaganaAlejandrina EscuderoAriadna Patino
Discovering and understanding the temporal evolution of events hidden in text corpora is a complex yet critical task for knowledge discovery. Although mining event dynamics has been an important research topic leading to many successful algorithms, researchers, research and development managers, intelligence analysts and the general public are still in dire need of effective tools to explore the evolutionary trends and patterns. This exploratory project focuses on developing and validating a novel idea called narrative animation. Narrative animation uses animated visualizations to narrate, explore, and share event dynamics conveyed in temporally evolving text collections. Film art techniques are employed to leverage the animated visualizations in information organization and change detection, with the goals of enhancing analytical power and user engagement. A prototype system called CityStories is being developed to generate narrative animations of events in cities derived from web-based text. If this novel, risky research is successful, it is expected to yield fundamental results in narrative animation that can advance the current paradigm in information visualization and visual analytics by developing novel techniques in using animations for presenting and analyzing dynamic abstract data at a large scale. The pilot system CityStories system is expected provide a novel network platform for education, entertainment, and data analytics. It will engage general users such as students, teachers, journalists, bloggers, and many others in web information visualization and study. Results of this research will be disseminated through publications, the World Wide Web, and collaborations with researchers and analysts. The project web site (http://coitweb.uncc.edu/~jyang13/narrativeanimation/narrativeanimation.htm) will include research outcomes, publications, developed software, videos, and datasets for wide dissemination to public.
Painting with Natural Selection is an interactive installation that uses evolution and scientific experimentation to create an artistic experience. Painting is the second phase of a larger art and science project that explores the relationship between evolution and reproduction. Phase I was building custom software that simulates virtual organisms growing, reproducing and evolving - Evorepro. Evorepro was funded by a Science Education Partnership Award led by Dr. John A. Pollock at Duquesne University. Painting was funded by a Spark Award from the Sprout Fund. In Painting, kids influence the evolution of simulated bacteria by changing their virtual environment. The experience allows kids to get creative right away as they develop an intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of evolutionary processes. The virtual organisms respond and evolve in real-time creating a visceral connection between the individual and their impact in the virtual world that leads to an awareness of our footprint in our real world and wonder at life's adaptability.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Carnegie-Mellon UniversityJoana Ricou