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.
In partnership with Future Makers and several Maryland public libraries, the Maryland State Department of Education’s Division of Library Development and Services (DLDS) will teach children ages 4 to 7 the basic principles of programming through the use of Primo, an open-source robotics platform. With Primo, children use blocks to create algorithms that guide a robot through a maze. This will establish a foundation for learning more advanced programming skills later on, set early learners on the path to fluency in computer science, and establish a stronger mindset in computational thinking through play and experimentation. As Primo does not rely on a computer screen, the program will be replicable in a variety of environments; the curriculum will also be inclusive to young children with varying degrees of ability.
Georgetown County Library will improve the digital-age critical workforce skills of local young people through STEM-related digital activities. Classes relating to online STEM resources, digital video production, and app development will result in increased skills and interpersonal abilities, as well as an appreciation for the public library as a dynamic and informative place. By working with a number of community organizations, the library seeks to reach a local youth community that has historically experienced high rates of poverty and low rates of high school completion, and build on previous efforts to provide job fairs, skills training, and other initiatives.
Museums continue to invest in and experiment with internet technologies and increasingly with social software environments (i.e., social networking). These technologies have the potential to lead to a number of important intellectual and social outcomes such as learning, community building, and greater public understanding of, in our case, science. It is the possibility of supporting learning in digital environments that is the focus of this research project. In our previous work, online facilitation has emerged as a big deal and perhaps determines successful online museum environments from unsuccessful environments. To study facilitation, we seek to understand facilitation styles and their outcomes in two distinct but representative museum environments. The first, Science Buzz at Science Museum of Minnesota, is a popular website identified by the field to be exemplary because of its educational value and its use of Web 2.0 functionality. The second case is the more distributed use of social software at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science (MLS). Instead of creating learning platforms that are hosted internally, MLS is experimenting with building learning communities where people are already gathering on the web like Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. We anticipate being able to identify clear, replicable facilitation styles and to identify outcomes associated with those styles.
Media MashUp (MMU) was an IMLS funded project (LG-07-08-0113 ) designed to help libraries build capacity for offering computer-based programs for youth. These programs were designed to help foster 21st Century literacy skills. The program focused on the Scratch programming language (http://scratch.mit.edu/), but also used other creative freeware programs (i.e., Audacity, Picasa, SAM animation, ArtRage). MMU was a partnership among six library systems from around the country and The Science Museum of Minnesota. Three staff members from each library participated in the program: two librarians or
The Media MashUp project is funded by the IMLS (Grant LG-07-08-0113 ) to build capacity at libraries for computer-based programs for youth that help build 21st Century literacy skills. Twenty first Century literacy skills include interactive engagement with technology, collaboration and team problem solving, taking initiative and managing time and the use of higher level processing skills (www.21stcenturyskills.org/). This project uses the Scratch programming platform (http://scratch.mit.edu/) developed at MIT to help foster youth's 21st Century literacy skills. The professional audience
This cooperative agreement will support a program of targeted outreach, professional development and national visibility for libraries and museums as important, community-based venues for student/youth game development and STEM learning. IMLS will provide financial support amounting to $100,000 for work over the Project period of January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013. as part of this key learning and development phase, we will conduct activities including targeted outreach, professional development, youth workshops, national promotion and documentation/evaluation.
On behalf of the Sun'aq Tribe of Kodiak, the SEALibrary (Sun'aq Ecological Archives and Library) will undertake a project to enhance access to information on Kodiak ecology and Alutiiq heritage while serving as a bridge between tribal members, researchers, and regulators. It will collect, preserve, and disseminate valuable local and traditional ecological knowledge with the goal of protecting the ecological resources of the region. It will create a local storehouse of knowledge accessible both in-house and online, including not only local knowledge but also legal notices and impact assessments from naval military exercises, hazardous waste cleanup, changes to fishing regulations, and threats to local food security. This comprehensive project will include document management training, policy and electronic database systems implementation, preservation planning, archives assessment, and cross-cultural outreach services.
The Leonard Lief Library and Department of Art at Lehman College will create an Animated Information Literacy Advocate to explore the feasibility of using animation to foster information literacy in college-age students. Information literacy skills, including assessing information, locating sources, thinking critically, and acting ethically, are especially vital for young people entering the workforce. Four videos featuring an animated advocate developed using Kabuki RealTime Animation software will introduce learners to critical thinking in dramatic scenarios. Focus groups will be conducted to measure student satisfaction and measure outcomes of learning. The advocate will be the first animated character to deliver information literacy instruction, providing the broader library field with a new area of research in online instruction as well as the ability to test three pedagogical strategies.
Purdue University will develop CrowdAsk - A Crowdsource Library Help System, a web-based help system for academic libraries. CrowdAsk will allow librarians, students, and faculty to ask and answer questions about library resources and tools. CrowdAsk will also support ranking of questions and answers by users as well as the use of scores and badges for user motivation. The project addresses issues of existing fragmented library and academic help channels, content reuse and preservation, and lack of user (particularly expert) participation. CrowdAsk will be open source and shared with the public. It will impact the way users interact with libraries, as well as promote better understanding and use of library resources. The project will give users power to support others in getting research help.
Westport Library, with its partners, Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) and Connecticut State Library - Division of Library Development (CSL-DLD), and with SPARK! Consulting, will introduce a new model of maker space in libraries and a way to systematically integrate the culture of interactive "making" into the library profession. Westport will introduce a culture of innovation, while honoring the needs of more traditional libraries. There will be self-directed, hands-on maker experiences; maker workshops; and makers-in-residence who will support workshops and innovation labs on topics such as robotics, LED quilt creations, and tinkering with home electronics repairs. The library will also create Interactive Innovation Stations (iStations) to introduce people to the concepts and techniques of innovative thinking. It will be an environment where people can experiment, take calculated risks, and work collaboratively.
Stanford University Library, in partnership with the University of Santa Cruz, will develop a publishable metadata scheme for digital games, including ontology and terminology, as well as a system and tools for citation of in-game events and game states. While the work of collection and preservation is underway, digital games present unique and complex stewardship problems, including methods for description, discovery and citation. As acquisition of this type of collection increases, challenges with cataloguing, storage, and access are compounded. This framework will provide a complete solution to the closely linked problems of finding, accessing, and citing digital games, a growing and important part of modern culture.