We examined an approach to reaching audiences who may not ordinarily engage with science. Termed Guerilla Science, this approach blends elements of access, by removing barriers to participation by embedding science into unexpected places, with those of inclusion, by designing activities that speak to the learning identities of participants.
The Cincinnati Museum Center will develop a permanent exhibition to showcase its invertebrate paleontology collection and develop related educational programming that builds on a strong commitment to gender equity. Using focus groups, prototypes, surveys, and feedback from existing programs, the museum will incorporate community input from key audiences into the design of the 4,800 square-foot immersive gallery, which will blend science, history, and technology. The museum will engage external designers to create schematic and final exhibit designs. The museum will develop and test related educational programs for families and students, with a special focus on engaging girls ages 7 to 14 in STEM activities.
Over a three-year period, the Lawrence Hall of Science will conduct research on the conversations of groups and families encountering an Augmented Reality (AR) experience in a museum environment. The research program will identify which design elements best facilitate conversations among groups of visitors, and determine if these conversations are both rich in scientific content and gender-balanced. The project will focus on four specific activities: understanding the learning associated with current AR activities, implementing design-based research to develop visitor conversation supports, designing and developing new AR programs with embedded conversation supports, and conducting iterative hypothesis-based research on how learning conversations happen in AR learning environments. The museum community will gain insights on design principles for supporting collaborative learning using AR. Project staff will disseminate results via conference workshops for museum professionals on designing AR to enhance family learning, and through publication in professional journals.
Sciencenter will develop a touring exhibition, Engineer.Design.Build, to spark interest and build confidence in STEM by providing learning opportunities about the broad impact engineers have on the environment and society. The museum will partner with Cornell University's College of Engineering to develop scientific content which will be reviewed by an advisory board of representatives from the academic, business, and informal science education sectors. Partners from informal learning institutions will provide expertise on the educational content to ensure that it is accessible and engaging for the target audience of 5-11 year olds. Through a combination of focus groups, youth/guest feedback during exhibition development, and experts in girls' engagement in STEM on the advisory board, the museum will ensure that the exhibition and programming are designed to appeal to girls, and accessible to all learners. The project will include front-end, formative, and summative evaluation through observations and mediated interviews, collecting data from youth, families, and school groups.
This project engages families in engineering design challenges through a sustainability and biomimicry lens. Families advance their engineering proficiencies while learning from nature to create a livable future.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This practitioner guide summarizes lessons learned from a three-year design-based research project focused on using elements of narrative (such as characters, settings, and problem frames) to evoke empathy and support girls' engagement in engineering design practices. The guide includes a summary of the driving concepts and key research findings from this work, as well as design principles for creating narrative-based engineering activities. Six activity case studies illustrate the design principles in action, and facilitation tips and observation tools offer practical guidance in developing
Recent studies have advocated for a shift toward educational practices that involve learners in actively contributing to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as a shared and public endeavor, rather than limiting their involvement to the construction of previously established knowledge. Prioritizing learners’ agency in deciding what is worth knowing and how learning takes place may create more equitable and inclusive learning experiences by centering the knowledge, cultural practices, and social interactions that motivate learning for people across ages, genders, and backgrounds. In informal learning environments, families’ social interactions are critical avenues for STEM learning, and science centers and museums have developed strategies for prompting families’ sustained engagement and conversation at STEM exhibits. However, exhibits often guide visitors’ exploration toward predetermined insights, constraining the ways that families can interact with STEM content, and neglecting opportunities to tap into their prior knowledge. Practices in the maker movement that emphasize skill-building and creative expression, and participatory practices in museums that invite visitors to contribute to exhibits in consequential ways both have the potential to reframe STEM learning as an ongoing, social process that welcomes diverse perspectives. Yet little is known about how these practices can be scaled, and how families themselves respond to these efforts, particularly for the diverse family audiences that science centers and museums aim to serve. Further, although gender and ethnicity both affect learning in informal settings, studies often separate participants along a single dimension, obscuring important nuances in families’ experiences. By addressing these outstanding questions, this research responds to the goals of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning opportunities for the public in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening engagement in STEM learning experiences and advancing innovative research on STEM learning in informal environments.
Research will address (1) how families perceive and act on their collective epistemic agency while exploring STEM exhibits (i.e., how they work together to negotiate and pursue their own learning goals); (2) whether and how families’ expressions of agency are influenced by gender and ethnicity; and (3) what exhibit design features support expressions of agency for the broadest possible audience. Research studies will use interviews and observational case studies at a range of exhibits with distinct affordances to examine families’ epistemic agency as a shared, social practice. Cultural historical activity theory and intersectional approaches will guide qualitative analyses of families’ activities as systems that are mediated by the physical environment and social setting. Education activities will involve an ongoing collaboration between researchers, exhibit designers, educators, and facilitators (high-school and college-level floor staff), using a Change Laboratory model. The group will use emerging findings from the research to create a reflection tool to guide the development of more inclusive learning experiences at STEM exhibits, and a set of design principles for supporting families’ expressions of agency. A longitudinal ethnographic study will document the development of inclusive exhibit design practices throughout the project as well as how the Change Lab participants develop their sociocultural perspectives on learning and exhibit design over time. Analyzing these shifts in practice within the Change Lab will provide a deeper understanding of what works and what is difficult or does not occur when working toward infrastructure change in museums. By considering how multiple aspects of families’ identities shape their learning experiences, this work will generate evidence-based recommendations to help science centers and museums develop more inclusive practices that foster a sense of ownership over the learning process for the broadest possible audience of families.
Awareness of a STEM discipline is a complex construct to operationalize; a learner’s awareness of a discipline is sometimes viewed through the lens of personal identity, use of relevant discourse, or knowledge of career pathways. This research proposes defining engineering awareness through a learner’s associations with engineering practices - fundamental processes involved in engineering such as identifying criteria and constraints, testing designs, diagnosing issues and assessing goal completion. In this study, a learner’s engineering awareness was determined by examining 1) their ability to
This paper provides detailed descriptions of the goals, theoretical perspectives, context, and methods used in A study of collaborative practices at interactive engineering challenge exhibits (the C-PIECE Study), the first of two studies in the Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) research program. The C-PIECE Study supported foundational and exploratory lines of inquiry related to engineering practices used by families engaging with design challenge exhibits. This paper describes the study background and methods as an anchor to four other products that detail these four specific lines of inquiry and
The purpose of this research was to explore associations between engineering practices included in the C-PIECE framework. In this work, we took particular interest in practices under the Defining a Problem proficiency. Practices under Defining a Problem have great potential to influence the entire exhibit interaction and early observations indicated that visitor groups did not engage frequently in these practices at the informed level, therefore they were seen as an opportunity ripe for study. Through observations, interviews, and video analysis, the DOT research team investigated the
Are you interested in co-creating fun activities that exercise groups’ engineering practices? Are you curious about the types of practices that groups can exercise through exhibits?
The Framework of Collaborative Practices at Interactive Engineering Challenge Exhibits (C-PIECE Framework) provides informal education professionals with a guide when co-developing, designing, facilitating, evaluating and researching engineering design challenge experiences.
This framework was developed with input from inter-generational families, including girls 9 to 14 years old. It was adapted from theory
This front-end evaluation study is part of Designing Our Tomorrow: Mobilizing the Next Generation of Engineers, a five-year project (2018–2023) led by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF, DRL-1811617) and project partners: Adelante Mujeres, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Fleet Science Center. The Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project seeks to promote and strengthen family engagement and engineering learning via compelling exhibit-based design challenges, presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by