The goal of this evaluation was to determine how museum visitors responded to the museum's existing live animal exhibits and identify recommendations for their new Live Animal Garden exhibit.
Antarctic Dinosaurs: A Giant Screen Film and Outreach Project aims to leverage the popularity and charisma of dinosaurs to draw museum audiences into a captivating educational journey, revealing the history and transformation of Antarctica and the planet’s polar ecosystems, and exploring the forces that continue to shape the continent. In addition to bringing to life a wealth of unfamiliar dinosaurs, amphibians and proto-mammals, this project will journey beyond the bones to reveal a more nuanced, multi-disciplinary interpretation of paleontology and Antarctica’s profound changes.
Centered
The University of California, Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), in partnership with the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, HI, propose to develop and evaluate curriculum-based content modules for spherical display systems. These modules will combine successful research-driven curriculum materials with the compelling nature of a spherical display to engage and inform museum visitors in the process of observing and interpreting patterns of global climate data.
This project, “Global, Local, Coastal”, will be led by Groundwork Hudson Valley and Sarah Lawrence College, to integrate and expand the work of three award-winning environmental education centers in Yonkers, NY – The Science Barge, Ecohouse and the Center for the Urban River (CURB). Its primary objective is to prepare low-income students for the impact of a changing climate so that they can participate both personally and professionally in a world in which these issues are increasingly prevalent. It reaches an audience that is not well served by traditional programs and is most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Over the course of two years, the project will serve 600-700 middle and high school youth, primarily from the Yonkers public school system, through a new, integrated curriculum that teaches about these issues from multiple perspectives. Beyond its impact on students, the project will have a broader impact on people in our region. Together, the Barge, Ecohouse and CURB are visited by close to 10,000 people each year and new exhibits will reinforce key themes related to resiliency and adaptation. Other partners include NOAA’s Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve, Lamont Doherty, and the Center for Climate Change in the Urban Northeast. The state’s NY Rising Program and Yonkers Public Schools are key partners too. The project will be carried out in a community that has been severely affected by extreme weather in the last decade, including three hurricanes. Outcomes will help create “an informed society to anticipate and respond to climate and its impacts.” It also addresses NOAA’s goal of a “Weather-Ready Nation,” and “Resilient Coastal Communities and Economies.
By engaging diverse publics in immersive and deliberative learning forums, this three-year project will use NOAA data and expertise to strengthen community resilience and decision-making around a variety of climate and weather-related hazards across the United States. Led by Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the Museum of Science Boston, the project will develop citizen forums hosted by regional science centers to create a new, replicable model for learning and engagement. These forums, to be hosted initially in Boston and Phoenix and then expanded to an additional six sites around the U.S., will facilitate public deliberation on real-world issues of concern to local communities, including rising sea levels, extreme precipitation, heat waves, and drought. The forums will identify and clarify citizen values and perspectives while creating stakeholder networks in support of local resilience measures. The forum materials developed in collaboration with NOAA will foster better understanding of environmental changes and best practices for improving community resiliency, and will create a suite of materials and case studies adaptable for use by science centers, teachers, and students. With regional science centers bringing together the public, scientific experts, and local officials, the project will create resilience-centered partnerships and a framework for learning and engagement that can be replicated nationwide.
Children in the Norfolk, Va., area will inherit the second highest sea level rise on the East Coast. In response, the non-profit Elizabeth River Project will prepare one of the first comprehensive youth education programs on climate change resilience on this coast. The Elizabeth River Project, working since 1993 to restore the environmental health of the urban Elizabeth River, will deploy its Dominion Virginia Power Learning Barge, “America’s Greenest Vessel,” and its new urban park, Paradise Creek Nature Park, to empower 21,000 K-12 students over three years to become informed decision makers and environmental stewards, prepared to adapt to rising seas. The project primarily will reach under-served schools in Norfolk and adjoining Portsmouth, Va. Lead science partner will be Old Dominion University, on the forefront of climate change research. Other partners include the Chrysler Museum of Art, ground zero for street flooding that has become routine in Norfolk. A youth strategy for the Elizabeth River “watershed” or drainage area will be disseminated nationally internationally by the City of Norfolk through its participation as one the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities. The youth strategy will be used by Norfolk to complement its Norfolk Resilience Strategy, prepared so far with adults in mind.
The Ocean Project will empower America's zoos, aquariums and science museums to become centers of innovation and effective leadership for healthy oceans and conservation in their communities, providing meaningful engagement opportunities for their 200 million annual visitors to become involved in helping with solutions. To help them do so, The Ocean Project is launching a competitive Innovative Solutions Grants Program that will provide financial resources for zoos, aquariums and science museums to develop innovative local and regional ocean conservation solutions and stewardship initiatives, with a special emphasis on engaging youth and minorities. To leverage and maximize the benefit of this small grants program, The Ocean Project will also provide the awardees with opportunities for capacity building in strategic communications and share the resulting new strategies and successes with our growing partner network of 2000 zoos, aquariums, science museums and other conservation and education organizations in all 50 States and worldwide.
From 2013-2016, Pacific Science Center, implemented the Exploring Earth Systems Sciences (EESS) project with the purpose of developing and delivering scripted demonstrations utilizing the Science On a Sphere (SOS) technology in order to promote understanding of and increase interest in Earth systems sciences. Specifically, the grant allowed the Science Interpretation team to research and write 20-minute presentations, targeted towards visitors aged 11 and older, about nine unique topics such as: climate change, weather, seasons, or the Polar Regions. Staff were then provided training in
The Dynamic Earth: You Have To See it To Believe It is a public exhibition and suite of programming designed to educate and excite K-8 students, teachers, and families about weather and climate science, plate tectonics, erosion, and stream formation. The Dynamic Earth program draws attention to the importance of large-scale earth processes and the human impacts on these processes, utilizing real artifacts, hands-on models, and NASA earth imagery and data. The program includes the exhibition, student workshops, family workshops, annual professional development opportunities for classroom teachers, innovative theater shows, lectures for adults by visiting scientists, and interpretive activities. The Montshire Museum of Science has partnered with Chabot Space and Science Center (CA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (NH) on various components. The project has broadened our internal capacity for providing quality earth science programming by greatly expanding our program titles and allowing us to create hands-on materials for use by our educators and to loan to schools in our Partnership Initiative. Programming developed during the grant period continues to reach thousands of students and teachers each year, both on-site and as part of our rural outreach efforts.
Climate Change: NASA’s Eyes on the Arctic is a multi-disciplinary outreach program built around a partnership targeted at k-12 students, teachers and communities. Utilizing the strengths of three main educational outreach institutions in Alaska, the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska partnered with the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage Museum and UAF researchers to build a strategic and long lasting partnership between STEM formal and informal education providers to promote STEM literacy and awareness of NASA’s mission. Specific Goals of the project include: 1) Engaging and inspiring the public through presentation of relevant, compelling stories of research and adventure in the Arctic; 2) strengthening the pipeline of k-12 students into STEM careers, particularly those from underserved groups; 3) increasing interest in science among children and their parents; 4) increasing awareness of NASA’s role in climate change research; and 5) strengthening connections between UAF researchers, rural Alaska, and Alaska’s informal science education institutions. Each institution chose communities with whom they had prior relationships and/or made logistical sense. Through discussions analyzing partner strengths, tasks were divided; the Challenger Center taking on the role of k-12 curriculum development, the Museum of the North creating animations with data pulled from UAF research, to be shown on both in-house and traveling spherical display systems and the Anchorage Museum creating table top displays for use in community science nights. Each developed element was used while visiting the identified communities both in the classroom environment and during the community science nights.
Climate Change Education produced climate change educational experiences for both professional and general public audiences. In particular, the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), in collaboration with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, and the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), developed new content for SMM’s Earth Buzz online network, developed a climate change educational program for middle and high school teachers, invited audiences of policy- and decision-makers to SMM for climate change discussions, and recruited and mentored a climate change team of high school students through SMM’s Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center. The project goals were to increase the awareness and understanding in target audiences that (1) human activities are now surpass natural processes as driving forces of atmospheric change, (2) the behavior of Earth's atmosphere in the 21st Century will be increasingly determined by humans, and (3) human ingenuity is the key to adapting to and mitigating the climate changes underway. Highlights of the project included organizing and hosting the October 26-28, 2011 City of Saint Paul Climate Change Adaptation Scenario Planning Workshop, which catalyzed climate resilience as a city planning priority, organizing and hosting with Morris A. Ward, Inc. the October 5-6, 2012 Climate Change Science for Minnesota Broadcast Meteorologists workshop which brought together local TV and radio meteorologists with some of the best climate scientists in the U.S., helping to organize and host on November 7, 2013 the State of Minnesota’s first conference devoted exclusively to climate change adaptation, and the adoption by the museum of a public statement on climate change (www.smm.org/climatechange). The project endures although the grant has concluded through the continued delivery of the museum’s Climate Changed outreach program to a wide array of audiences and through the museum’s continued involvement with the many partnerships established during the Climate Change Education project, as exemplified by the museum working with the City of Saint Paul and Macalester College on an upcoming St. Paul Neighborhood Climate Adaptation Workshop and a Worldwide Views on Climate and Energy event (climateandenergy.wwviews.org/).