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
The nature of the learning that occurs with real versus replicated objects and environments is an important topic for museums and science centers. Our comparative, exploratory study addressed this area through an investigation of family visits to two different settings: an operating permafrost research tunnel, and a replica of this permafrost tunnel at a science center. We conducted and analyzed family interviews, grounding our work in the Contextual Model of Learning and ideas about sensory components of learning. We found significant differences between the real and replicated environments
Museums and similar informal learning settings offer opportunities for children and families to learn together in an engaging way. Current exhibits rely mainly on parents, teachers, signage, and staff in science museums to provide support and guidance. Since it is not always feasible to have knowledgeable staff on hand and not all parents have the same knowledge and background, children receive varied support and people often miss the point of the learning experience or activity. This project will develop and research a new genre of Smart Science Exhibits that use artificial intelligence (AI) in an adaptive system to support children in learning science by doing science. The aim of the project is to incorporate AI adaptivity and personalization to maximize inquiry-based STEM learning and engagement in informal learning settings. This research builds on the project team's first Smart Science Exhibit (EarthShake), which uses AI vision to give interactive feedback to visitors based on their actions and guides them through scientific inquiry. In the project's preliminary work, the first smart exhibit demonstrated higher engagement and more learning gains than resulted from a traditional museum exhibit addressing the same scientific content. Smart exhibits can extend and enhance the limited support that staff and parents can provide. This project will develop and investigate adaptive approaches to mixing exploration and AI guidance, which will personalize feedback during constructive exploration. The project will build on learning science techniques and technology, proven in intelligent tutoring systems in formal settings, and apply this to different informal learning contexts. The goal is to provide just-in-time learning support, which will extend the time visitors spend with exhibits, thereby deepening inquiry-based science learning. The project is partnering with science museums and afterschool programs, which will enable thousands of children and families from a wide variety of backgrounds to use the project's smart exhibits each year. Smart Science Exhibits is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources as part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments.
Many informal learning settings are considering mixed-reality (MR) technologies to increase engagement and understanding of science. Using Smart Science Exhibits, the project will investigate how design choices in mixed-reality systems impact users' engagement and learning of STEM concepts. (Mixed reality is the blending of the physical world and the digital world, enabling interaction between human and artificial intelligence.) Project research will extend current research, which is largely descriptive, by investigating empirical results on learner outcomes. Key research questions are: What types of adaptivity and personalization can improve Smart Science Exhibits and MR systems generally? What balance of exploration and AI guidance is best to maximize enjoyment, engagement and learning? Do findings about the effective features of Smart Science Exhibits generalize to different content areas and informal learning settings? The project will employ user-centered design research, formative evaluation, and controlled experimentation to discover how mixed-reality systems should be designed to best meet visitor and staff needs in informal learning settings including multiple museums and afterschool providers. Data on learner behaviors in mixed-reality experiences in a variety of informal settings will inform the design of Smart Science Exhibits. The project will investigate whether adaptive approaches generalize across content and context to achieve better STEM learning, engagement, collaboration, and productive dialogue. The project will incorporate the team's prior technical research, which developed both vision techniques to track children's physical interactions and interactive pedagogical techniques to provide scaffolds for and reactive feedback on children's inquiry and construction behaviors. New technical research will develop AI techniques for adaptive task selection and personalized feedback that draws on a visitor's history of interaction. Project research and design resources will be widely shared with the science museum educators and designers through presentations at annual conferences and with researchers, developers and others through peer-reviewed journal publications and professional publications.
This Innovations in Development award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Nesra YannierScott HudsonKen Koedinger
A long history of research suggests that early informal STEM learning experiences such as block play, puzzles, visiting zoos and science museums can build a strong foundation for STEM learning and which leads to later STEM success. Yet, children from low-income and historically underserved communities have less access to these opportunities due to scarce resources and barriers to access such as transportation and cost. To address these challenges, this project will endeavor to infuse public urban spaces such as local parks, bus-stops, and grocery stores with playful and engaging informal STEM learning opportunities in low-income Latinx neighborhoods as a strategy for understanding how public spaces, when co-designed with community partners and informed by the science of learning, can foster rich, informal STEM learning experiences for young children in neighborhood places where families naturally spend time. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
Using techniques of Community-Based, Participatory Design Research, researchers will collaborate closely with community families and partners in Santa Ana, California to achieve three aims: 1) Co-design a series of outdoor Playful Learning Landscape (PLL) exhibit installations with community partners that reflect the goals, values, and cultural capital of the Latino community. 2) Explore how caregivers and their children experience PLL exhibit installations and examine the development and changes in: a) caregiver-child STEM conversation and interactions, and b) caregiver attitudes about the importance of informal STEM learning and their beliefs about their role in facilitating STEM learning. 3) Leverage existing data from county partners to examine the potential effects of having multiple PLL installations within a specific neighborhood on promoting STEM learning and development across an array of cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes in early-childhood. This project will advance current knowledge on informal STEM learning by demonstrating new ways to understand the cultural assets that Latinx families bring to learning contexts, showing how the unique assets and needs of a local community can be incorporated into public infrastructure, and documenting the STEM-related learning experiences and interactions that occur in these settings. Due to a partnership with the Orange County Children and Families Commission, which collects data on child learning and development on every child in the county, researchers will examine the longitudinal impacts of a cluster of playful STEM-learning exhibit installations in a single neighborhood on children's developmental outcomes compared to matched neighborhoods without access to these installations. By leveraging everyday routines to promote playful STEM learning and caregiver-child STEM-related interactions, this project will: 1) empower caregivers to build a STEM learning foundation for children during early childhood; and 2) serve as a model for how cities can be re-designed to enhance ubiquitous STEM learning across public spaces, with the cultural capital of local families and children at the center of urban design and revitalization.
This Innovations in Development award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Andres BustamanteKathy Hirsh-PasekJune Ahn
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
Under the Arctic: Digging into Permafrost, a 2,000 square foot museum exhibition, engaged visitors in real and simulated experiences related to the nature of permafrost, permafrost research, and the impact of climate change on permafrost. Development of the exhibition was part of a larger National Science Foundation Advancing Informal STEM Learning grant, Hot Times in Cold Places: The Hidden World of Permafrost, awarded to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Two related evaluation studies led us to our conclusions. First, we
This poster was presented at the 2019 Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Annual Conference. It describes the Move2Learn project, which studies embodied interactions during science learning in order to articulate design principles about how museum exhibits can most effectively encourage cognitive and physical engagement with science.
With funding from NIH SEPA, OMSI is creating a mid-sized travelling exhibition that will promote public understanding of neuroscience research and its relevance to healthy brain development in early childhood.
The purpose of this report is to support the project team by assessing the extent to which the prototype activities, content, and labels tested contributed to visitor engagement, understanding, confidence, and future use of one or more strategies outlined. It was important to the project team that the exhibition be developed in collaboration with the communities for whom it is
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) and Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment (BASE) contracted RK&A to conduct an evaluation of their partnership’s progress and outcomes over three years. The goal of the summative evaluation is to explore students, families, and teachers’ perceptions of and relationship to BBG and the BBG-BASE partnership. The evaluation also explored attitudes and understandings of how to engage in nature exploration, scientific inquiry, and environmental stewardship in a meaningful way.
How did we approach this study?
RK&A developed questionnaires to be
The data collection procedure and process is one of the most critical components in a research study that affects the findings. Problems in data collection may directly influence the findings, and consequently, may lead to questionable inferences. Despite the challenges in data collection, this study provides insights for STEM education researchers and practitioners on effective data collection, in order to ensure that the data is useful for answering questions posed by research. Our engineering education research study was a part of a three-year, NSF funded project implemented in the Midwest
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ibrahim YeterAnastasia Marie RynearsonHoda EhsanAnnwesa DasguptaBarbara FagundesMuhsin MeneskeMonica Cardella
Computational Thinking (CT) is an often overlooked, but important, aspect of engineering thinking. This connection can be seen in Wing’s definition of CT, which includes a combination of mathematical and engineering thinking required to solve problems. While previous studies have shown that children are capable of engaging in multiple CT competencies, research has yet to explore the role that parents play in promoting these competencies in their children. In this study, we are taking a unique approach by investigating the role that a homeschool mother played in her child’s engagement in CT
For the past two decades, researchers and educators have been interested in integrating engineering into K-12 learning experiences. More recently, computational thinking (CT) has gained increased attention in K-12 engineering education. Computational thinking is broader than programming and coding. Some describe computational thinking as crucial to engineering problem solving and critical to engineering habits of mind like systems thinking. However, few studies have explored how computational thinking is exhibited by children, and CT competencies for children have not been consistently defined