Soundprint Media Center, Inc. and RLPaul Productions, produced a cross-media package that includes a website (capecosmos.org), radio programs, and museum-based family events related to the 50th anniversary of the Space Program. The project, Out of This World (OOTW), is a program that sought to stimulate interest in science by presenting the little known stories of African-Americans and women who contributed to the U.S. Space program, and to provide historical context for the scope and reach of the nascent aerospace science program. Through radio documentaries and collaborations with science centers and museums, including the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), OOTW broke new ground in developing an integrated media project that reached different audiences. The deliverables included: three radio documentaries (; an educational DVD package with 20 video mini-documentaries, curator interviews with space research pioneers and a learning guide; an interactive website that recreates a space mission circa 1961, and a series of live two-way video conferences between NASM and some 14 partner museums and science centers. OOTW used the power of investigative journalism and the reach of public radio and local science museums to connect with adults and school-age children, to cut across demographic categories, and to include a significant number of minority and at-risk children.
Montana’s Big Sky Space Education: NASA ExplorationSpace at ExplorationWorks CP4SMP grant goal was to stimulate youth and adult interest in human space exploration and STEM careers in communities across Montana, through exhibits, field trips, STEM classes, and public presentations by ethnically diverse NASA women scientists and engineers.
Project partners included Dr. Dava Newman, MIT Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Gui Trotti, Trotti and Associates; Dr. Angela DesJardins of the MT Space Grant Consortium at MT State University; the Montana Girl’s STEM Collaborative; the Montana Women’s Foundation ; Boeing; and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
The grant’s objectives were:
stimulating general public interest in NASA’s human exploration of Space, facilitated through exhibits about space exploration and space careers, and
supporting STEM education, especially in robotics, computer science, and electro-mechanical inventions in elementary through high school students.
Outcomes included public awareness of this NASA mission, increased awareness of the role of the ISS, and increased interest of elementary girls in technology classes. This grant also led to the procurement/development of space-themed exhibits, including the national touring Black Holes exhibit, and exhibits on the ISS and the Mars rovers created by ExplorationWorks.
Four exhibits were produced: the Knowledge Station, MarsWalker, NASA Women in Aerospace (including Newman’s Biosuit) and “Women in Space,” a national touring exhibition showcasing Dr. Dava Newman’s prototype Mars BioSuit and NASA’s ethnically-diverse women scientists and engineers.
NASA CP4SMP grant support also opened the door to:
a Boeing Corporation investment in robotics systems appropriate for 1st through 8th graders,
expansion of our after-school Girl Tech for low-income girls,
the introduction of after-school and summer Sci Girls for 4th through 6th grade girls,
an annual Girl’s STEM Round-up STEM career immersion day for 5th through 12th grade girls, showcasing young Montana STEM career women as mentors
challenges in accommodating all the children and youth who wish to enroll in our year-round robotics classes.
the introduction of Girl Scout robotics-focused (“Bots and Bling”) Overnights at ExplorationWorks. Families travel 4 to 6 hours to participate in the Overnights, made possible by an ancillary grant from the Montana Women’s Foundation.
The National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) seeks to maximize access to shared resources within projects and with public and private sector organizations and institutions interested in expanding girls’ participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, the NGCP is a robust national network of more than 3,000 girl-serving STEM organizations. Currently, 31 Collaboratives, serving 40 states, facilitate collaboration between more than 12,800 organizations who serve more than 7.7 million girls and 4.4 million boys. The NGCP occupies a unique role in the STEM community because it facilitates collaboration with all stakeholders who benefit from increasing diversity and engagement of women in STEM. These stakeholders form Regional Collaboratives, who are connected to local girl-serving STEM programs. Regional Collaboratives are led by leadership teams and advisory boards with representatives from K-12 education, higher education, community-based organizations, professional organizations, and industry. NGCP strengthens the capacity of girl-serving STEM projects by facilitating collaboration among programs and organizations and by sharing promising practice research, program models, and products through webinars, collaboration training, and institutes. This is accomplished through a tested comprehensive program of change that uses collaboration to expand and strengthen STEM-related opportunities for girls and women. In each replication state, the NGCP model creates a network of professionals, researchers, and practitioners, facilitating collaboration within this network, and delivering high-quality research-based professional development. Participating programs can also receive mini-grant funding to develop collaborative STEM-focused projects. To date, over 27,000 participants have been served in 241 mini-grant projects, and over 17,000 practitioners have been served through in-person events and webinars. The NGCP’s collaborative model changes the way practitioners and educators work to advance girls’ participation in STEM. It facilitates the development of practitioners in their knowledge of good gender equitable educational practices, awareness of the role of K-12 education in STEM workforce development, and mutual support of peers locally and across the United States.
This report presents an evaluation study of Soundprint Media's project, Out of This World (#0741737), which was funded by the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Education Program. The mission of the project was to introduce adult radio listeners and youth participants in museum events to the historical context and challenges faced by African-Americans and women who were involved as professionals in the United States' space program in the 1960's. The project website, capecosmos.com, included an interactive menu of activities set within the context of a NASA mission control center
"Human +" is a collaboration among the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), NSF Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center (QoLT ERC) of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), and the Institute for Learning Innovation. The project will engage engineers, educators, designers, and people with disabilities in a process of participatory design to create a 2,500 square foot traveling exhibition entitled "Human +". The STEM content is engineering, specifically the extraordinary technological advances being made to enhance human abilities. The project is making three significant contributions to the Informal Science Education (ISE) field: 1) It is a model of close integration of an NSF-funded engineering research center into an ISE project. (2) It engages people with disabilities, both as participants and audiences. (3) It broadens engagement with engineering as a participatory, creative, and socially important ISE undertaking. Project deliverables are: (1) a model for participatory design of ISE activities to generate innovation among engineers, people with disabilities, ISE professionals, and designers; and 2) a 2,500 square-foot traveling exhibition engaging the public in the science, technology, and social issues of human enhancement. Front-end evaluation will be conducted by OMSI to explore pre-existing knowledge and attitudes, integrating significant numbers of people with disabilities including veterans, young people, and older people. Formative evaluation will likewise be integrated with the participatory design process, with prototypes being tested both by audiences and by the core "Human +" participatory design team. Summative evaluation by Institute for Learning Innovation will address both the effectiveness of the participatory design process and the effectiveness of the exhibition in addressing the National Academy for Engineering goals for public understanding of engineering as a creative and socially engaged field. An estimated 700,000 visitors will experience the "Human +" exhibition at OMSI and NYSCI. In addition, OMSI will tour the exhibition through its extensive and diverse network of science centers, with 24 science centers having expressed interest as potential host sites. The Science Friday webcast/podcast will reach an estimated 1.3 million listeners. Public audiences will engage in the topic of engineering and better understand its importance to human existence through experiencing one compelling research area. The project team will work with the Veterans Administration and DARPA to engage veterans with disabilities both as participants and as audiences. The exhibit with its human-focused content will also stimulate interest among older adults and promote the engineering field to groups underrepresented in engineering such as people with disabilities, girls, and minority youth. The project places cutting-edge technology and engineering practice in a profoundly personal context. "Human +" will contribute to the empowerment of the great majority of people who have, or will have, disabilities during their lifetime and for those of us who care for people with disabilities.
John Carroll University, Cleveland's International Women's Air and Space Museum and Cleveland Public Schools are partnering in a three-year project to provide a cross-age, collaborative exhibit development experience to increase young peoples' science understanding and interest in science and teaching careers. The program exposes 120+ high school and undergraduate women to the skills of educational program planning and implementation. Content includes science, technology, engineering and math related to flight, and the history and role of women in flight related careers. The project proposes a highly supportive learning environment with museum, science and education experts working alongside students at secondary and undergraduate levels to design exhibits that will meet the interest and needs of the museum, and the young children and families from Cleveland schools who visit. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, the evaluation will measure change in participant career interests, content understanding and perception of science, technology, engineering and math subjects, and skill development in presenting these concepts to public audience members. Public and professional audience experiences will also be evaluated. More than nine hundred local elementary school age children, their families and 15,000 general public audience members will participate in student-designed, museum-based exhibits and programs. Deliverables include a model for university/museum partnerships in providing exhibit development and science learning experiences, three team-developed permanent exhibits about flight and women in science, a set of biographies about women and flight in DVD format and three annual museum based community events. The model program will be informed by national advisors from museum/university partners across the United States who will attend workshops in connection with the projects public presentations in years one and two. These meetings will both provide opportunities to reflect on the program progress and to develop new strategies in the evolution of the program design. Workshop participants will develop plans to implement similar programs in their home locations, impacting another layer of public audiences. The transferability of the model to these new sites will be measured in year three of the proposal. An additional 25,000 participants are expected to be impacted in the five years following the grant period. Beyond the implementation sites, the model's impact will be disseminated by the PI and participants in the program through peer reviewed journals and presentations at national conferences.
Investigators from the MIT Media Lab will develop and study a new generation of the Scratch programming platform, designed to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- essential skills for success in the 21st century. With Scratch, young people (ages 8 and up) can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, then share their creations with others online. Young people around the world have already shared more than 1 million projects on the Scratch community website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The new generation, called Scratch 2.0, will be fully integrated into the Internet, so that young people can more seamlessly share and collaborate on projects, access online data, and program interactions with social media. The research is divided into two strands: (1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications. (2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration. This work builds on a previous NSF grant (ITR-0325828) that supported the development of Scratch. Since its public launch in 2007, Scratch has become a vibrant online community, in which young people program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations - and, in the process, learn important computational concepts and strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating. Each day, members of the Scratch community upload nearly 1500 new Scratch projects to the website - on average, a new project almost every minute. In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation: (1) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity? (2) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity?
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won't just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity. Broader Impacts: The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a promising practice for increasing gender diversity in IT.