The University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and the Museum of Science, Boston (MoS) were awarded an Informal Science Education grant from the National Science Foundation (#0813541) for the project, Responsive Virtual Human Museum Guide. The goal of the project was to use computer-generated character animation, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to create interactive characters, or virtual humans, that could engage in face-to-face communication with museum visitors. During the three year project, the MOS and ICT project teams created
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Susan FoutzJeanine AnceletKara HershorinLiz DanterUniversity of Southern CaliforniaMuseum of Science
The Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE) at TERC embarked on a research project to study serious online collaborative gaming environments as a vehicle for engaging the public with National Science Digital Library (NSDL) resources. The goal of the project was two-fold: to design and test serious games that use a prototype virtual resource center; and to build a community and framework for creating a Serious Games Pathway to deliver NSDL resources into this burgeoning community with the aim of facilitating STEM learning. As part of this endeavor, the external evaluators under the
Our Year 3 formative evaluation of Go Botany, a four-year NSF-funded project focused on botanical learning, centered on tracking the continued development and the launch of the Go Botany Simple Key, which contains botanical data on more than 1200 native plants in the New England region. The project is a collaboration between the New England Wild Flower Society and three partnering institutions: The Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT; The Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, Maine; and the Yale Peabody Museum on Natural History in New Haven, CT. During Year 3, the Go Botany Simple Key was
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangNew England Wild Flower Society
In August 2009, the Program Evaluation and Research Group (PERG) at Lesley University contracted with the project's PI at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) to evaluate My Dome: Defining the Computational and Cognitive Potential of Real Time Interactive Simulations in an Immersive Dome Environment, an NSF funded grant. The project focuses on creating interactive experiences in immersive virtual environments, and builds off previous work the PI and co PIs have done in developing films and immersive experiences in domes and traveling domes. The project includes staff from the Carnegie Museum
In 2011, ORG received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning by redesigning and expanding the "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" website; adding components to enable teachers and students to search episodes for specific themes, locations, or scientific concepts; and enhancing the lesson plans to explicitly match the content standards for teaching science. One of the major grant objectives was to make the "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" website content widely accessible as an open source via an Internet
Frontier Scientists (FS) is an NSF-funded University of Alaska - Fairbanks (UAF) and WonderVisions (WV) collaborative project whose mission was to excite the general public about ongoing science in Alaska and the Arctic. The Frontier Scientists website (www.frontierscientists.com) covers a wide range of topics including: humanities, geology, biology, marine science, archaeology, ecology, chemistry, and more. At the time of the summative evaluation, it included 53 video clips (the major focus of the website), as well as a number of blog posts, narrative descriptions, and short bios.This
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deborah PerryUniversity of Alaska - Fairbanks