National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded an Informal Science Education (ISE) grant, since renamed Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) to a group of institutions led by two of the University of California, Davis’s centers: the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) and the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Additional partner institutions were the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Audience Viewpoints Consulting (AVC). The summative evaluation study was
The University of California, Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES), ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), and the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) will study how 3-D visualizations can most effectively be used to improve general public understanding of freshwater lake ecosystems and Earth science processes through the use of immersive three-dimensional (3-D) visualizations of lake and watershed processes, supplemented by tabletop science activity stations. Two iconic lakes will be the focus of this study: Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, and Lake Champlain in Vermont and New York, with products readily transferable to other freshwater systems and education venues. The PI will aggregate and share knowledge about how to effectively utilize 3-D technologies and scientific data to support learning from immersive 3-D visualizations, and how other hands-on materials can be combined to most effectively support visitor learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems. The project will be structured to iteratively test, design, and implement 3-D visualizations in both concurrent and staggered development. The public will be engaged in the science behind water quality and ecosystem health; lake formation; lake foodwebs; weather and climate; and the role and impact of people on the ecosystem. A suite of publicly available learning resources will be designed and developed on freshwater ecosystems, including immersive 3-D visualizations; portable science stations with multimedia; a facilitator's guide for docent training; and a Developer's Manual to allow future informal science education venues. Project partners are organized into five teams: 1) Content Preparation and Review: prepare and author content including writing of storyboards, narratives, and activities; 2) 3-D Scientific Visualizations: create visualization products using spatial data; 3) Science Station: plan, design, and produce hands-on materials; 4) Website and Multimedia: produce a dissemination strategy for professional and public audiences; 4) Evaluation: conduct front-end, formative, and summative evaluation of both the 3-D visualizations and science activity stations. The summative evaluation will utilize a mixed methods approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and will include focus groups, semi-structured interviews, web surveys, and in-depth interviews. Leveraging 3-D tools, high-quality visual displays, hands-on activities, and multimedia resources, university-based scientists will work collaboratively with informal science education professionals to extend the project's reach and impact to an audience of 400,000 visitors, including families, youth, school field trip groups, and tourists. The project will implement, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge of how 3-D visualizations and technologies can be designed and configured to effectively support visitor engagement and learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems, and will evaluate how these technologies can be transferred more broadly to other informal science venues and schools for future career and workforce development in these critical STEM areas.
In this paper, we present the DeepTree exhibit, a multi-user, multi-touch interactive visualization of the Tree of Life. We developed DeepTree to facilitate collaborative learning of evolutionary concepts. We will describe an iterative process in which a team of computer scientists, learning scientists, biologists, and museum curators worked together throughout design, development, and evaluation. We present the importance of designing the interactions and the visualization hand-in-hand in order to facilitate active learning. The outcome of this process is a fractal-based tree layout that
The overarching purpose of the Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network is to develop and evaluate a new approach to climate change education that connects zoo visitors to polar animals currently endangered by climate change, leveraging the associative and affective pathways known to dominate decision-making. Utilizing a polar theme, the partnership brings together a strong multidisciplinary team that includes the Chicago Zoological Society of Brookfield, IL, leading a geographically distributed consortium of nine partners: Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, OH; Como Zoo & Conservatory, St. Paul, MN; Indianapolis Zoo, IN; Louisville Zoological Garden, KY; Oregon Zoo, Portland, OR; Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, PA; Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI; Toledo Zoological Gardens, OH, and the organization Polar Bears International. The partnership leadership includes the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. The partnership is joined by experts in conservation psychology and an external advisory board. The primary stakeholders are the diverse 13 million annual visitors to the nine partner zoos. Additional stakeholders include zoo docents, interpreters and educators, as well as the partnership technical team in the fields of learning innovations, technological tools, research review and education practice. The core goals of the planning phase are to a) develop and extend the strong multidisciplinary partnership, b) conduct research needed to understand the preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and learning modes of zoo visitors regarding climate change; and c) identify and prototype innovative learning environments and tools. Internal and external evaluations will be conducted by Facet Innovations of Seattle, WA. Activities to achieve these goals include assessments and stakeholder workshops to inventory potential resources at zoos; surveys of zoo visitors to examine demographic, socioeconomic, and technology access parameters of zoo visitors and their existing opinions; and initial development and testing of participatory, experiential activities and technological tools to facilitate learning about the complex system principles underlying the climate system. The long-term vision centers on the development of a network of U.S. zoos, in partnership with climate change domain scientists, learning scientists, conservation psychologists, and other stakeholders, serving as a sustainable infrastructure to investigate strategies designed to foster changes in public attitudes, understandings, and behavior surrounding climate change.
The authors provide an analysis of pairs of children interacting with a multi-touch tabletop exhibit designed to help museum visitors learn about evolution and the tree of life. The exhibit’s aim is to inspire visitors with a sense of wonder at life’s diversity while providing insight into key evolutionary concepts such as common descent. The authors find that children negotiate their interaction with the exhibit in a variety of ways including reactive, articulated, and contemplated exploration. These strategies in turn influence the ways in which children make meaning through their
The Climate Change Toolkit includes a suite of resources that address the science behind climate change while encouraging participants to take action to reduce the effects of climate change. Each resource has been designed to be low cost and easy for educators to reproduce. Contents of the Toolkit include: (1) Ten Hands-on Cart Activities - These hands-on, cart-type science activities for families in an informal education setting or for children in an afterschool setting, engage participants with the science of climate change. The activities are divided into two categories, those that address the science behind climate change, and those that address how individual choices affect the rate of climate change. (2) Four Portable Self-Guided Exhibits Kits - These self-guided science kits use four hands-on activities per kit to explore how climate change is affecting the forest, ocean, urban, and atmosphere environments. Each kit can be packaged in a small bag or box and bundled together with an activity map box for check-out by families in an informal education setting. (3) Public Presentation - CO2 and You is a twenty-minute presentation that provides the option of using interactive clickers to introduce the science behind how fossil fuel consumption leads to climate change. The interactive presentation also explores how simple energy choices can have a positive effect on the climate. (4) Museum Field Trip Program - The Power the Future field trip uses an interactive diagram to explain how carbon based fossil fuels such as coal emit carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change. The program then discusses the need to transition away from carbon based energy sources such as fossil fuels to those that do not emit carbon dioxide, such as wind power. The second section of the program guides visitors through a hands-on inquiry activity where they explore their own windmills.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Charlie TrautmannKatie LevedahlAlberto López
PERG conducted the formative and summative evaluations of Windows on Earth, a project led by the Center for Earth and Space Science Education (CESSE) at TERC. The project included numerous partners and contributors who focused on the development of the Windows on Earth software, exhibit and website, as well as four museums who participated in the development and evaluation process: Boston's Museum of Science, (MOS), the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, (A&S), the St. Louis Science Center (SLSC), and the Montshire Museum of Science (MM) in Vermont. The project also coordinated some programming
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangJoan KarpTERC IncJodi Sandler
The project includes a simulation based Family Learning Program to be administered through the International Challenger Learning Center (CLC) network. The goal is to develop families' skills in learning as a team through science, math and technology (SMT) in an environment where parents and children are co-travelers in a world of ideas. PACCT is disseminated through ten of the Challenger Learning Centers reaching 22,000 families nationwide. Many of these activities are completed in the home at no cost to the anticipated 12,500 participating families. Through this network of centers, all types of communities are served in many states. The activities include Sim-U-Voyages, where family teams work at home; Sim-U-Challenges, where families create a physical model responding to a challenge; Sim-U-Visits, where families hear from scientists and work as scientists in a team solving a problem; and Sim-U-Ventures, which result in flying a mission. Cost sharing is 8%.
Life on Earth aims to advance (1) public understanding of the history of life on Earth and biodiversity, and (2) our knowledge of how people interact and learn from large interactive science data visualizations on multi-touch displays in public settings. Our multi-institutional project team has developed the DeepTree, the FloTree, and Build-A-Tree (BAT). The focal exhibit, called the DeepTree, utilizing large data sets from four online databases including Tree of Life web project (www.tolweb.org), Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), National Center for Biotechnology Information (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and Time Tree (www.timetree.org), allow museum visitors to explore the relationships of 70,000 species, spanning over 3.5 billion years of evolutionary history using touch gestures on a large multi-touch computer display. Embedded inside the DeepTree, the "FloTree" encourages exploration of evolutionary processes within a single population. "Build-a-Tree" (BAT) is a multi-level phylogenetic tree-building game. These learning experiences are designed to target core evolutionary concepts and be self-directed, physically interactive, embodied, and collaborative. The Life on Earth exhibit has been installed at California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Field Museum in Chicago, University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln Nebraska, and Harvard Museum of Natural in Cambridge Massachusetts. Please visit the Life on Earth website at https://lifeonearth.seas.harvard.edu/ to find more details on publications, and the ongoing learning research and summative evaluation. The Life on Earth project brings together a team of interdisciplinary researchers in human-computer interaction and information visualization, learning sciences, museum exhibit design, cognitive and developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology.
IDSolutions, in partnership with the National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) and eight NAHEC member organizations will develop an original project to provide informal science education experiences to children, families and the local community via visual communications' technology. This initiative includes building a technical infrastructure that will connect participating Health Education Centers. It will expand beyond the installation of a network and will focus the bulk of its energy on the technology's application -- generating inquiry-based science experiences through active engagement with content that originates from remote locations. Through the creation of an Interactive Videoconferencing Programming Collaborative (IVPC), IDSolutions, NAHEC, and NAHEC Members will produce and disseminate to our target audience of school-age children, families, community groups and teachers, a high volume of science-related programming. The core content of the initial set of programs will be extracted from one of the nation's most popular life science traveling exhibits called "Grossology." These distance-learning programs will originate from a central "studio" location and will be available during the day, after school, on weekends, during summer breaks and holidays. Supporting this effort will be Advanced Animations (designers of "Grossology" and "Experience Science!"), a science education consulting company.
The Shared Signing Science Planning Project will develop a prototype of a web-based Signing Science Pictionary. The prototype will be piloted to families and caretakers of deaf and hard of hearing children to study the feasibility and effectiveness of the learning technology and identify the activities that are most effective in helping deaf children learn life science at informal science centers. The project team will also compile a dictionary of science terms with the intention of including the terms in a full version of the Pictionary. The final Pictionary will be comprehensive; including scientific terms from life, physical, Earth, and space science and will be presented in animated sign language accompanied by written explanations and pictorial illustrations. The project will also produce a video guide with a description of activities that parents can implement with their children. The planning project will result in a prototype with 100 life science terms of species found at the three informal science centers the children and parents will visit to test the prototype. These informal sites are hands-on and exploratory featuring marine organisms and a range of terrestrial flora and fauna to touch and interact with. To prepare for the site visits, parents and caretakers of deaf or hard of hearing children will be taught how to use the Pictionary with children through a Flash-based movie that introduces the interactive features and assists the parents in engaging with their children in three activities using the signing scientific vocabulary. The preparatory vocabulary work with the parents and children will lay the educational foundation for the visits to the informal science education sites. Families will test the initial project prototypes with deaf children using a control group for comparison. Pre-tests will be used to assess childrens' vocabulary before use of the Pictionary. Follow up tests will test knowledge of the new words and will include field observations of children in museums, zoos, and farms, where the new terms will come to life in corresponding exhibits. The results of the ongoing evaluation will be compiled into a guide for other developers of similar materials for the deaf community, and will impact the development of the final project. The project will broaden participation of an underserved audience in STEM learning and generate new knowledge about how to effectively integrate emerging learning technologies into exhibits and programs for deaf learners.The project team includes TERC and Vcom3D and collaborators from Gallaudet University Regional Center at Northern Essex Community College, the College of the Holy Cross, and the Learning Center for Deaf Children. Participating informal science education institutions are represented by the EcoTarium, Davis' Farmland, and the Stone Zoo. These partnerships provide the necessary expertise and support for the proposed project to have significant impact on advancing STEM learning in informal settings for children with hearing disabilities through the use of assistive learning technologies.
Dinosaur Island is a 3D computer simulation with herds of sauropods and ceratopsians, flocks of pteranodons, hunting packs of carnivores and authentic plants and trees from over 65 million years ago all controlled by the user. You can think of Dinosaur Island as a digital terrarium in which a balance between the species and their diets must be maintained or the ecosystem will collapse. It is up to the user to determine how many and what kinds of dinosaurs and plants populate the island. Start off simple with just a few sauropods and some plants; but you better make sure that those big plant-eaters have the right food to eat. Did you know that many of the plants from the Jurassic were poisonous? You also need to make sure that there are some carnivores around to keep those sauropod herds in check; otherwise they will quickly outstrip their food supplies. Dinosaur Island is an Adventure: Yes, it is a bit like those famous movies because you can take 'photographs' of your dinosaurs, save them, post them and share them with your friends (you can even 'name' your dinosaurs, 'tag' them and track them throughout their lives). You will be able to walk' with the dinosaurs without being trampled under their giant feet. You will be able to follow along when a female T-Rex goes out to hunt without fear of becoming dinner for her family. You will be able to 'garden' by 'planting' vegetation where you like and watch the plants grow over time. Dinosaur Island is Educational: Our reputation – both in our 'serious games' and our contracted simulations – is for historical accuracy. All of our computer games, serious games and simulations are meticulously researched. Dinosaur Island will also include an extensive hyperlinked interactive 'booklet' about the dinosaurs that live on Dinosaur Island, their habitat and the plants and vegetation that grow there. Designasaurus, the game that we created in 1987, was named Educational Game of the Year. We will exploit the computer environment that is now available (more memory and faster machines allow for 3D rendering) to make Dinosaur Island even more of an immersive educational experience. Dinosaur Island is Fun: Playing with herds of dinosaurs is just good fun. You can 'pick them up' and move them around, plant crops for them to eat or you can even 'get inside' a dinosaur and control its actions. Regardless of your age, Dinosaur Island is guaranteed to be hours of fun.