This study focused on narrative reflections families recorded shortly after they visited the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children’s Museum. They recorded their narrative reflections in a multi-media station called Story Hub. Some families brought the projects they had made in Tinkering Lab with them into Story Hub. We asked if families who had their project with them engaged in more STEM-related talk and associations to prior and future experiences than those who did not.
This presentation was a part of a workshop/paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Children's Museums. The presentation includes strategies on how to increase STEM learning through tinkering experiences at museums.
Conversations shortly after hands-on learning experiences can consolidate children’s fleeting patterns of engagement with objects into long-lasting memories. Moreover, conversational reflection can add layers of understanding of events beyond what is available from direct experience with objects alone.
For the past several years, my colleagues and I have partnered with practitioners at Chicago Children’s Museum on projects to build knowledge and a research base for educational practices in museums. One focus of our work together concerns family engagement in conversational reflections about
Experiences-including museum experiences- that are packaged as stories are more likely to be remembered by both children and adults. For museum visitors, the simple act of narrating what they've done even no more than ten minutes ago can make their experience more meaningful and memorable. How connections are made between a museum experience and lasting learning, are driving the collaboration between practice and research at the Chicago Children's Museum and Loyola University Chicago.
This report, from the "Tinkering EU: Building Science Capital for All" project, provides a theoretical rationale for understanding the relationship between Tinkering as a pedagogical approach, students’ individual science capital, and inclusive STEM teaching approaches. By exploring the relationship between these three areas, it invites professionals to reflect on the ways in which Tinkering can be used a teaching tool for building science capital.
“Tinkering EU: Building Science Capital for All” aims to develop activities and resources that support a learner-centred culture, improve science education and develop 21st century skills - all of which are fundamental for active citizenship, employability, and social inclusion. To do this, it adopts ‘Tinkering’, an innovative pedagogy developed in the USA, which is used by museums, and has proven able to create a lifelong engagement with science for everyone. Tinkering works particularly well for people who argue that “they are not good at science” or are disaffected from any formal teaching and learning process. It can be a powerful tool to tackle disadvantage. The project integrates Tinkering into the school curriculum to develop the science capital of disadvantaged youth through the use of museums. It addresses students from 8 to 14 years old (primary and junior high schools).
Coordinator: National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci
Partners:
University of Cambridge – UK
NEMO Science Museum – The Netherlands
Science Gallery Dublin – Ireland
CosmoCaixa – Spain
Science Center Network – Austria
NOESIS – Greece
The concept of connected learning proposes that youth leverage individual interest and social media to drive learning with an academic focus. To illustrate, we present in-depth case studies of Ryan and Sam, two middle-school-age youth, to document an out-of-school intervention intended to direct toward intentional learning in STEM that taps interest and motivation. The investigation focused on how Ryan and Sam interacted with the designed elements of Studio STEM and whether they became more engaged to gain deeper learning about science concepts related to energy sustainability. The
Out-of-school settings promise to broaden participation in science to groups that are often left out of school-based opportunities. Increasing such involvement is premised on the notion that science is intricately tied to “the social, material, and personal well-being” of individuals, groups, and nations—indicators and aspirations that are deeply linked with understandings of equity, justice, and democracy. In this essay, the authors argue that dehistoricized and depoliticized meanings of equity, and the accompanying assumptions and goals of equity-oriented research and practice, threaten to
This CAISE report is designed to track and characterize sector growth, change and impact, important publications, hot topics/trends, new players, funding, and other related areas in Informal STEM Education (ISE) in 2017. The goal is to provide information and links for use by ISE professionals, science communicators, and interested stakeholders who want to discover new strategies and potential collaborators for project and proposal development. Designed as a slide presentation and divided into sectors, it can be used modularly or as a complete report. Each sector reports on research, events
The Maker movement has grown considerably over the past decade, both in the USA and internationally. Several varieties of Making have been developed, but there are still many important questions to ask and research to conduct about how different programmatic structures may relate to the potential impact Maker programs can have on individuals and communities. WestEd, in collaboration with the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, the University of Michigan C. S. Mott Hospital Children's Hospital, and the Children's Hospital of Orange County, is conducting a year-long exploratory research study that will focus on the out-of-school learning by adolescents and young adults in children's hospitals. This research study will focus on mobile and dedicated Makerspaces in hospitals to support patients' learning. The application of Makerspaces to hospital environments is a unique opportunity to research a critical need of chronically ill individuals, i.e. to explore how Making can enhance patients' agency, creative STEM learning, and physical well-being. The proposed study is building on the prior work of the principal investigator and will: (1) examine the nature and processes of learning in children's hospitals; (2) revise the current design of the mobile Makerspace and the associated implementation model in response to variations in programmatic contexts across multiple hospital settings and disparate patients' conditions; and (3) investigate and test the effectiveness of the Makerspace approach as it relates to both patients' learning and health outcomes. The study would contribute to longer-term efforts to develop a comprehensive, scalable, and sustainable strategy to determine the programmatic viability of the mobile Makerspace approach across a more varied array of hospital settings. This project has the potential to have a much broader impact by reaching out to other isolated students beyond the hospital environment, including those in residential treatment facilities for behavioral and emotional problems, as well as those attending programs designed to help youth who have been in trouble with the law get back on track. 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.
This project's goals are to contribute to the understanding of how to: (1) describe and measure the education and health impact of mobile Makerspaces on chronically ill patients, and (2) design and sustain implementation models in various hospital settings. Since a children's hospital is a challenging context to support a patient's learning, it is not typically conducive to learning. Patients are constantly interrupted by the demands of the illness, by the strict protocols that need to be adhered to, and by the medical staff who manage their exhaustive treatment regimens. The mobile Makerspace is intended to adjust the environment in deliberate ways, allowing researchers to study and observe what kinds of learning intervention models enable youth and young adults to recapture a sense of their own agency and enable them to see themselves as creators, and makers of things that improve their own and others' lives. The project will have two strands: one on learning and one on adaptation of the model. In the learning strand, the study will investigate how engaging with the Makerspace can enhance patients' learning by provoking their sense of curiosity, encouraging them to set up and pursue personal goals via invention, and inspiring them to feel more agentive in taking charge of their learning process i.e., development of affinity for and fluency in the ways of knowing, doing and being (the epistemologies and ontologies) of engineers or scientists. In the adaptation strand, they will identify challenges and opportunities for implementing Makerspaces and develop an implementation plan that provides a process for introducing Makerspaces into hospital settings.
The Maker movement has grown considerably over the past decade, both in the USA and internationally. Several varieties of "making" have been developed, but there are still many important questions to ask and research to conduct about how different programmatic structures may relate to the potential impact Maker programs can have on individuals and communities. As part of a larger, long-range initiative in their local community, the New York Hall of Science proposes to leverage the philosophy and activities of the Maker movement to take important first steps toward realizing their eventual goal of developing family and community-wide commitment to and improvement of STEM education. The project would build both foundational and practical knowledge about how parents with little or no prior knowledge of or experience with Making choose to engage with, contribute to, and learn from Maker programming designed for families with children from low-income households and backgrounds that are under-represented in the STEM professions. The intent is to build their understanding of the value of Making as a pathway toward deeper STEM learning. The project is characterized as "high-risk with potentially high-payoff." It applies a community psychology approach (rather than individual psychology) to the study of Making, and it focuses on parents as potential learners and leaders. While some work has been done in the field with respect to the role of parents in Maker environments, this is a new approach to the study of Making and its potential influence on the broader culture of STEM learning in a community. 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.
Two informal learning environments will be developed and studied at the New York Hall of Science: Learning Together, a table-top, minimally staff-facilitated setting in the Hall's science library, and Family Making, a high-tech and staff-facilitated experience in the Hall's maker facility. The study poses two research questions: (1) How, and to what extent, do the Learning Together and Family Making programs attract and sustain parental engagement, parental facilitation of children's activity, and parents' own explorations of Making? (2) From a community psychology perspective, what social structures, resources, social processes, and surrounding institutional conditions support or impede these parental pathways into exploring and understanding Making as a pathway toward STEM learning? The study will involve sustained collaborations between the Hall's Maker Space staff and research team, and will seek to generate guidance about how to design Maker programming that attracts and retains low-income, under-served family groups and new knowledge about how external structures and practices shape this audiences' perceptions of and interest in Making as a mode of STEM learning.