Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its after-school program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. In the fall of 2014, Techbridge Girls began offering after-school programming at five elementary and two middle schools in the Highline Public School district, located near Seattle, WA.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the
The evaluation study supports the project Distance Learning Education Programs at the Saint Louis Zoo. To better understand what teachers want and need, and the characteristics of the settings in which their students learn, the Zoo conducted an online survey of the teachers of students with special needs in May 2014. The purpose of this evaluation was to clarify and expand the survey findings to support the design, development, and implementation of the Zoo distance learning curriculum so that it works effectively across a variety of school settings for K12 students with special needs and
Under a subcontract with Randi Korn & Associates, who conducted a study of the on‐site museum exhibit, RMC was engaged to conduct an evaluation of the Places of Invention online map site for the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The Places of Invention online map, part of the 3,500 square foot on‐site exhibit, was developed as a platform for collecting invention stories related to specific places or landscapes submitted by Smithsonian staff, Smithsonian Affiliations, and visitors to the online map. RMC investigated three key topics related to
This evaluation reports on the Mission: Solar System project, a 2-year project funded by NASA. The goal of the Mission: Solar System was to create a collection of resources that integrates digital media with hands-on science and engineering activities to support kids’ exploration in formal and informal education settings. Our goal in creating the resources were: For youth: (1) Provide opportunities to use science, technology, engineering, and math to solve challenges related to exploring our solar system, (2) Build and hone critical thinking, problem-solving, and design process skills, (3)
The fifth annual Invent It. Build It. event, sponsored by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Girl Scouts of the USA, WGBH’s Design Squad Global, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and Techbridge was held at the SWE annual conference in Los Angeles, CA. Participants included a record-breaking 619 middle school girls, plus 300 of their parents/guardians and middle school educators. More than 200 SWE members volunteered at the event to facilitate the activities, act as role models, and work closely with the middle school girls throughout the day. Thirty-two exhibitors provided information about camps
Fusion Science Theater (FST) uses elements of playwriting to make informal science education more engaging as well as educational. FST shows incorporate an overarching scientific question that is asked and then answered by a series of participatory exercises and demonstrations. The shows also use “embedded assessment” of learning, which asks children to “vote their prediction” both before and after these activities. The FST National Training and Dissemination Program had three major goals: (1) To develop and implement a Performance Training Program to train professional audiences to perform
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Madison Area Technical CollegeJoanne Cantor
Life on Earth is interactive software installed as a museum touchtable exhibit that uses data about over seventy thousand (70,000) species from several databases to help visitors explore and deepen their understanding of biodiversity, evolution and common ancestry, and the history of life on earth (DeepTree/ FloTree). Some installations also include a smaller exhibit that poses puzzle challenges about evolutionary relationships among species (Build-a-Tree (BAT)). The exhibit was installed at four natural history museums across the U.S. – the Harvard Museum of Natural History (Cambridge, MA)
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Harvard UnivesityJim HammermanAmy SpiegelJonathan Christiansen
The Museum of Science, Boston partnered with Goddard Space Flight Center and Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium to develop educational resources around aeronautical and aerospace engineering. The main goals of the project were to increase the awareness of engineering work done during NASA missions, to engage children in the Engineering Design Process (EDP), and to support educators developing engineering-focused curricula. The study evaluated three main deliverables: 1) A planetarium program featuring NASA’s robotic missions of discovery, 2) A summer teacher workshop designed for middle
Tornado Alley is a giant screen adventure that follows renegade filmmaker Sean Casey and the scientists of VORTEX2, the largest tornado research project ever assembled, on their epic missions to encounter one of Earth’s most awe-inspiring events: the birth of a tornado. Program components included the giant screen film; a Web site; educators’ guides and resources for classroom and informal learning; and professional development sessions utilizing cyberinfrastructure to facilitate remote interactions between educators and researchers performing actual data manipulations. In addition, an