RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Programming includes
Neighborhood Walks led by teams of scientists/engineers and artists
Community Workshops, Local Artist Projects, and Youth Mentorship focused on neighborhood and citywide water issues
Intergenerational participation, from seniors and adult learners to young adults, teens, and middle schoolers
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Designing Our World (DOW) empowers and promotes girls’ pursuit of engineering careers by cultivating networks of community stakeholders and engaging girls with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant and altruistic nature of engineering.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Indianapolis: City as a Living Laboratory (NSF Grant #DRL-1323117) examines how different public art mediums can serve as conduits for informal science learning at a city-wide scale.
The New Children's Museum will launch the LAByrinth project to engage the community in the creation of a permanent art installation. The museum will convene a cross-disciplinary team to design and build the LAByrinth, a climbing structure that will serve 140,000 people annually. The museum will develop relationships with underserved families and current and future museum users, and also create an ongoing community-based exhibition development process to create sustainable mechanisms for continued community involvement. The project will introduce a new socially-engaged process for creating exhibitions, which will serve as a sustainable creative catalyst for San Diego families.
The Lawrence Hall of Science will implement the "Mobile Inventor's Lab," a project to extend the benefits of an ongoing outreach program into a model that can serve visitors at a variety of locations in communities underserved by local science education organizations. The museum will refine its engineering design experiences to be easily reconfigured and delivered in a variety of locations, and develop activities and kits for library and community partner staff. This project will expand the impact of the hall's educational resources and offer audiences the opportunity to interact with and learn about engineering design experiences in their own communities.
In this article, science center and museum professionals from around the world share ways that they are engaging visitors in hands-on innovation. Work from the following organizations are discussed: Exploratorium, Discovery Center of Idaho, Lawrence Hall of Science, Iridescent, Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, Ideum, Discovery Place, Ontario Science Centre, Bootheel Youth Museum, Science Centre Singapore, Children's Museum of Phoenix, Discovery Museums (Acton, MA), Discovery Center of Springfield, Missouri, Museum of Science, Boston, Questacon--The National Science and Technology
This Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) project from the University of New Hampshire focuses on a "living bridge", which exemplifies the future of smart, sustainable, user-centered transportation infrastructure. Bridges deliver such a fundamental service to society that they are often taken for granted. Typically, bridges only stir the public's interest when they must unexpectedly be replaced at great cost, or, worse, fail. The Living Bridge project will create a self-diagnosing, self-reporting "smart bridge" powered by a local renewable energy source, tidal energy, by transforming the landmark Memorial Bridge--a vertical lift bridge over the tidal Piscataqua River, with pedestrian access connecting Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine--into a living laboratory for researchers, engineers, scientists, and the community at large. The Living Bridge will engage innovators in sensor and renewable energy technology by creating an incubator platform on a working bridge, from which researchers can field test and evaluate the impact and effectiveness of emerging technologies. The Living Bridge will also serve as a community platform to educate citizens about innovations occurring at the site and in the region, and about how incorporating renewable energy into bridge design can lead to a sustainable transportation infrastructure with impact far beyond the region. Sustainable, smart bridges are key elements in developing a successful infrastructure system. To advance the state of smart service systems and clean energy conversion, this project team will design and deploy a structural and environmental monitoring system that provides information for bridge condition assessment, traffic management, and environmental stewardship; advances renewable energy technology application; and excites the general public about bridge innovations. This PFI:BIC project is enabled through partnerships between academic researchers with expertise in structural, mechanical and ocean engineering, sensing technology and social science; small businesses with expertise in instrumentation, data acquisition, tidal energy conversion; and state agencies with bridge design expertise. The Living Bridge technical areas are structural health monitoring, tidal energy conversion with fluid-structure interaction measurements, estuarine environmental monitoring, and outreach communication. Sensors will be used to calibrate a three-dimensional analytical structural finite element model of the bridge. The predicted structural response from this model will assess the measured structural response of the bridge as acceptable or not. Instruments installed on the turbine deployment platform will measure the spatio-temporal structure of the turbulent inflow and modified wake flow downstream of the turbine. Resulting data will include turbine performance and loads for use in fluid-structure interaction models. Deployed environmental sensors will measure estuarine water quality; wildlife deterrent sensors will deter fish from the turbine. Hydrophones and video cameras will be used before and during turbine deployment to monitor environmental changes due to turbine presence. Outreach efforts will make bridge data, history, and information about new systems accessible and understandable to the public and K-12 educators, facilitated by an information kiosk installed at the bridge. Public awareness will be assessed with survey methods used in the N.H. Granite State Poll. The lead institution is the University of New Hampshire (UNH) with its departments of Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Sociology, and the Center for Ocean Engineering. Primary industrial partners are a large business, MacArtney Underwater Technology Group, Inc. (Houston, TX) and two small businesses Lite Enterprises, Inc. (Nashua, NH) and Eccosolutions, LLC (New Paltz, NY.) Broader context partners are New Hampshire Department of Transportation, NH Fish & Game Department, NH Port Authority, NH Coastal Program, City of Portsmouth (NH), Sustainable Portsmouth (nonprofit), Maine Department of Transportation; U.S. Coast Guard, Archer/Western (Canton, MA, large business), Parsons-Brinkerhoff (Manchester, NH, large business), UNH Tech Camp, UNH Infrastructure and Climate Network, UNH Leitzel Center for Mathematics, Science and Engineering Education, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Changing Places (a joint Architecture and Media Laboratory Consortium, in Cambridge, MA).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Erin BellTat FuMartin WosnikKenneth BaldwinLawrence Hamilton
The Exploratorium, in collaboration with the Boys and Girls Club Columbia Park (BGC) in the Mission District of San Francisco, is implementing a two-year exploratory project designed to support informal education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) within underserved Latino communities. Building off of and expanding on non-STEM-related efforts in a few major U.S. cities and Europe, the Exploratorium, BGC, and residents of the District will engage in a STEM exhibit and program co-development process that will physically convert metered parking spaces in front of the Club into transformative public places called "parklets." The BGC parklet will feature interactive, bilingual science and technology exhibits, programs and events targeting audiences including youth ages 8 - 17 and intergenerational families and groups primarily in the Mission District and users of the BGC. Parklet exhibits and programs will focus on STEM content related to "Observing the Urban Environment," with a focus on community sustainability. The project explores one approach to working with and engaging the public in their everyday environment with relevant STEM learning experiences. The development and evaluation processes are being positioned as a model for possible expansion throughout the city and to other cities.
The Designing Our World (DOW) project centers on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) equity and addresses the need for more youth, especially girls, to pursue engineering and fill vital workforce gaps. DOW will integrate tested informal science education (ISE) programs and exhibits with current knowledge of engaging diverse youth through activities embedded in a social context. Led by teams of diverse community stakeholders and in partnership with several local girl-serving organizations, DOW will leverage existing exhibits, girls’ groups, and social media to impact girls’
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryAnne Sinkey
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting held in Washington, DC. It describes a project that uses museum-based exhibits, girls' activity groups, and social media to enhance participants' engineering-related interests and identities.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It discusses a project that connects rural, underserved youth and families in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho to STEM concepts important in sustainable building design.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Palouse Discovery Science CenterKathleen RyanChristine BervanKathy DawesPatty McNamara