AMNH will use NOAA weather satellite data to annotate 72 high definition (HD) video time-series global cloud cover visualizations using thermal infrared brightness temperature data acquired by five geostationary satellites and joined into global mosaics at half-hourly intervals. The HD visualizations will be used in informal and formal education activities and will be made available on the Web. These media pieces will be used for informal education activities at AMNH and 28 other informal science institutions (ISI) around the United States . The target population of visitors to subscribing ISIs is currently ten million and is projected to be over 15 million by the end of the grant. The HD visualizations will be used in formal settings, as well. Fifteen schools throughout New York City with large numbers of new English Language Learners will be targeted and professional development for teachers of ELL students will be provided through programs at AMNH as well. AMNH s effort focuses on weather and climate patterns that will be visible in the cloud-data visualizations. All viewers of the media will learn about general circulation patterns and changes in phase of water associated with the hydrologic cycle.
Science On a Sphere (SOS) at Fiske Planetarium will raise awareness and understanding of Earth system science for over 30,000 visitors per year, using student docents and newly-developed, tested pedagogy. SOS will enhance Fiske's ability to engage 3,000 university students and 30,000 K-12 students and members of the public. A student docent program will transform the traditionally passive experience of a planetarium visit into an interactive learning opportunity. The docents will be drawn from two sources: undergraduates who will be future science teachers, who we take from a selective CU program called "STEM-TP", and Hispanic university and high school students taught by Fiske's planetarium manager Francisco Salas. Docents will talk with visitors and help them understand key science issues that affect the earth, leading to more informed decision-making. Fiske will develop bilingual pedagogical material and new data sets, and share them with NOAA and SOS sites. To support the docents, and visiting students and teachers, Fiske Education Manager Traub-Metlay will lead development of explanatory materials that challenge visitors and provide context for what they are seeing. These will be translated into Spanish by Fiske Manager Salas. New data sets, contributed by faculty members, will expand the range of SOS, into space, adding solar interior models, the celestial sphere, and the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang, along with new terrestrial data such as the worldwide distribution of forest fires. SOS will become a focal point in Fiske's longstanding tradition of teacher workshops, which are often done in cooperation with the University of Colorado and NOAA scientists and highlight NOAA s role monitoring the earth and sun. It also will be integrated with a small suite of hands-on exhibits we are installing that explain how observations can be made in infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays in addition to visible light. These would complement SOS, which features multi-wavelength data. Fiske and its Boulder Colorado-area partners have raised $75,000 to cover the full cost of SOS hardware, and have formal institutional commitments to long-term program development. This award from NOAA will go into materials development, evaluation, and student pay. Colorado communities are aware of NOAA s important work and the nearby David SkaggsCenter , but security measures make it difficult to visit there. Fiske is much more accessible. Fiske will improve the usefulness of all SOS sites by conducting formative evaluation to assess what kinds of SOS presentations work best with public and school audiences, giving feedback to NOAA and all SOS users.
"Birds in the Hood" or "Aves del Barrio" builds on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's (CLO) successful Project Pigeon Watch, and will result in the creation of a web-based citizen science program for urban residents. The primary target audience is urban youth, with an emphasis on those participating in programs at science centers and educational organizations in Philadelphia, Tampa, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Participants will develop science process skills, improve their understanding of scientific processes and design research projects while collecting, submitting and retrieving data on birds found in urban habitats. The three project options include a.) mapping of pigeon and dove habitats and sightings, b.) identifying and counting gulls and c.) recording habitat and bird count data for birds in the local community. Birds in the Hood will support CLO's Urban Bird Studies initiative by contributing data on population, community and landscape level effects on birds. Support materials are web-based, bilingual and include downloadable instructions, tally sheets, exercises and results. The website will also include a web-based magazine with project results and participant contributions. A training video and full color identification posters will also be produced. The program will be piloted at five sites in year one, and then field-tested at 13 sites in year two. Regional dissemination and training will occur in year three. It is anticipated that 5,000 urban bird study groups will be in place by the end of the funding period, representing nearly 50,000 individuals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rick BonneyJohn FitzpatrickMelinda LaBranche
WNET is producing "The Human Spark," a multimedia project that includes a four-part television series (4 x 60 min) for national primetime broadcast on PBS, innovative outreach partnerships with museums, an extensive Web site and outreach activities, including a Spanish-language version and companion book. Hosted by Alan Alda, "The Human Spark" will explore the intriguing questions: What makes us human? Can the human spark be found in the differences between us and our closest genetic relative -- the great apes? Is there some place or process unique to the human brain where the human spark resides? And if we can identify it, could we transfer it to machines? The programs will explore these questions through presenting cutting-edge research in a number of scientific disciplines including evolution, genetics, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral science, anthropology, linguistics, AI, robotics and computing. The series will highlight opposing views within each field, and the interdisciplinary nature of science, including its intersection with the humanities. The series will develop a new innovative format, the "muse concept", which involves pairing the host with a different scientific expert throughout each program. The outreach plan is being developed with a consortium of four leading science museums, American Museum of Natural History in New York, Museum of Science in Boston, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, paired with their respective local public television stations. An additional six museums and local broadcasters will be chosen through an RFP process to develop local initiatives around the series. Multimedia Research and Leflein Associates will conduct formative as well as summative evaluations of the series and web.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
William GrantJared LipworthGraham CheddBarbara Flagg
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History will partner with The Exploratorium and with three smaller science museums that have strong connections to rural and Spanish-speaking populations in Texas: Discovery Science Place, Loredo Children's Museum, and Science Spectrum to develop TexNET, a four-year project modeled on the Exploratorium Network for Exhibit-based Teaching (ExNET). TexNET builds on lessons learned from past exhibit outreach models and addresses the needs of small, rural partners for exhibits and capacity-building workshops. Each small museum partner will host a set of ten exhibits for one year. Exhibit topics are 1) motion, 2) weather and 3) sound. Workshops focus on inquiry learning techniques, science content, programming and workshop design, as well as the institutional needs of each partner. Based on feedback from formative evaluation, the project added three additional partners in its final year, the Children's Museum of Houston, the Austin Children's Museum, and the Don Herrington Discovery Center, and focused its remaining year on building institutional capacity around tinkering. Inverness Research Associates will conduct the project evaluation. They will examine the success of this project by looking at the effectiveness of the TexNET model, the success of the individual exhibit elements to engage rural communities, the effectiveness with which this project has enhanced the abilities of local rural communities to sustain their own educational improvements and the effectiveness of the training components in increasing the capabilities of the local museums to serve their rural audiences.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Charlie WalterSamuel DeanJoe HastingsRobert Lindsey
The New York Hall of Science is overseeing a complex, four-year applied research and traveling exhibit development project on "precursor concepts" to the theory of evolution. These concepts pertain to key ideas about life -- variation, inheritance, selection, and time (VIST) -- and are organized around the principle that living things change over time. The central research question is: Can informal, museum-based interventions prepare young children (5 -12) to understand the scientific basis of evolution by targeting their intuitive pre-evolutionary concepts? The work involves many collaborators -- museum personnel around the country, university researchers, exhibit designers and evaluators, web designers, the Association of Science-Technology Centers and a number of advisors in the biological sciences, psychology and in informal and formal education. The products include applied research studies that will add to the conceptual change knowledge base in cognitive psychology, a 1,000 square-foot exhibit plus discovery boxes, a section on the UC-Berkeley Understanding Evolution web site, extensive on site and online staff training opportunities for participating museums and others, several dissemination activities including two research symposia, and bilingual (English and Spanish) exhibit materials and family guides. The project is positioned as a new model in informal science education for integrating research, development and evaluation, with applicability beyond the life sciences to other STEM fields.
The Children's Museum of Houston seeks to develop a 1,500 sq ft bilingual traveling exhibition based on their bilingual "Magnificent Math Moments" activities. This project simultaneously addresses two very important needs: the relative lack of mathematics exhibits for young children and for Spanish-speaking audiences. The exhibition is based on Patron (Pattern) Point where the visitor meets math superheroes, Subtracta, Capt. Mas in the settings of Subtracta's Puzzle Parlor; Capt. Mas's Marina; and Formas (Shapes) Family Shipping Yard. It will provide an inviting setting for introducing the target audiences to mathematics through the use of characters, environments and puzzles. BROADER IMPACT: Fabrication of a second version of the traveling exhibition will extend the number of institutions reached through two national tours. These exhibitions, which target children ages 5-10 and adults, are projected to reach some 1.4 million visitors in 24 museums over five years; sites will be selected to reach Hispanic audiences in smaller, low-income urban and rural areas. For further impact CMH is forming another network of museums that will benefit from this project, even though the institutions will not be able to host the traveling exhibition. CMH also is developing ancillary materials and services to accompany the exhibition that include activity kits and cart, character costumes, training guides, parent materials and other resources.
This project is a multimedia initiative designed to increase the public and youth understanding of how scientists work. Deliverables include "Pulse of the Planet" radio programs in both English and Spanish; related web news features and photo galleries at National Geographic.com; and formative and summative evaluations of the project. The project will select 27 scientists and citizen scientists (7 of them Latinos) to provide first-person "insider" stories of scientific endeavor using the "audio diary" format. They will be provided with minidisk field recording kits and digital cameras and given hands-on training by the PI. Excerpts from their diaries will be used on the nationally broadcast radio programs and website. Some of these will feature citizen science projects. The project's partners include The Self-Reliance Foundation and the Hispanic Radio Network that will produce Spanish-language adaptations of Pulse of the Planet programs; the National Geographic will create editorial features for its news website; and Citizen Science project partners including Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, and Earthwatch, among others will encourage direct participation in projects linked to the radio and web information. It is estimated that 1.25 million people will hear each of the radio programs and 50,000 unique visitors will read the stories on the web site.
Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, CA, will develop a three-pronged project called "Round and Round" focused on the geometry, science and technology of circles and wheels. All three project products (one permanent and one traveling version of a 2000-sq. ft. exhibition; an array of complementary educational programs for children ages 3-10; and published research on patterns of interactions among families of diverse backgrounds in museum settings) will be developed in cooperation with developmental psychologists from the University of California at Santa Cruz and advisors from Latino and Vietnamese communities in San Jose. "Round and Round" exhibits and programs will offer a trans-cultural, gender-neutral, and multi-disciplinary look at the ingenuity and ubiquity of circles. Together they will provide a comprehensive array of interactive experiences that help children, ages 3-10, and adults explore the mathematics, physics, physical properties and engineering advantages of circles and wheels. The project is expected to serve three million visitors in science and children's museums across the nation within four years of implementation.
The Miami Museum of Science, in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, will develop a 5000-sq. ft. interactive, bilingual traveling exhibition titled "Amazon Voyage: Vicious Fishes and Other Riches." The exhibition will immerse visitors in the Amazon's rich diversity through direct contact with some of its most (ill-deservedly) notorious denizens. Spotlighting the rarely seen research conducted by renowned North- and South American scientists, "Amazon Voyage" will present visitors with the scientists' ongoing work. Visitors will discover that economy and ecology of the Amazon are intertwined, and explore their own connection to this region through the global trade in ornamental fish, arriving at a heightened appreciation of how personal choices can influence environmental outcomes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sean Duran
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This CAREER grant interweaves research and teaching focused on understanding how social groups construct meaning during scientific conversations across different learning contexts, such as classrooms, museums and the home. This work will be translated into formal educational settings and used to inform teaching practices within pre-service University and in-service school district settings. The research and educational emphasis will be on creating conceptual links between social learning in diverse settings and the creation of corridors of opportunity between formal and informal learning institutions. To date there has been little research with families from cultural and linguistic minority populations, such as Latino families, at informal learning settings and virtually none that integrates formal and informal learning, or impacts teaching. The five-year project will: 1. Conduct Study 1, aimed at making fundamental cross-cultural comparisons of family conversational meaning making at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and linking this work with family interviews, reflective conversations and visits to family homes; 2. Review the theoretical framework and conduct Study 2, which will incorporate lessons learned from Study 1, and linking this research to formal classrooms; and 3. Use the findings (at each stage) to inform teaching practice with UCSC undergraduate (Science majors) and graduate (Science credential, MA and Ph.D.) students, and, in collaboration with teacher research groups for new and experienced teacher in schools that serve predominantly Latino students. This research plan provides an opportunity for viewing several inter-connected mechanisms, including family interactions and conversations, compelling science content, naturalistic learning in museum settings, and, finally, analyzing these factors in order to inform teaching practices that promote bilingual minority students to the rank of scientists.
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) will develop "Outdoors Indoors, an Interactive Natural Science Exhibition for Young Children," ages 3-8, and their families. Two 2,500 sq. ft. versions of the exhibition will be developed -- one to be installed at OMSI and the other to travel. Building on children's innate curiosity about the natural world, the exhibition invites visitors to explore a woodland environment where they can develop process skills and learn natural science concepts. The exhibition will also focus on ways that parents can help encourage their children's science learning, both through exhibit activities and through exploration of the natural world outdoors. Bilingual text (English and Spanish) will help make the exhibition accessible to a diverse audience. Ancillary materials for families and educators will further enhance learning.