Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended targets of such investments learn to develop new maker related educational programs. Using the framework of Expansive Learning, focusing on organizational learning processes resulting in new and unfolding forms of activity, this paper begins to fill
The Center for Integrated Quantum Materials pursues research and education in quantum science and technology. With our research and industry partners, the Museum of Science, Boston collaborates to produce public engagement resources, museum programs, special events and media. We also provide professional development in professional science communication for the Center's students, post-docs, and interns; and coaching in public engagement. The Museum also sponsors The Quantum Matters(TM) Science Communication Competition (www.mos.org/quantum-matters-competition) and NanoDays with a Quantum Leap. In association with CIQM and IBM Q, the Museum hosted the first U.S. museum exhibit on quantum computing.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert WesterveltCarol Lynn AlpertRay AshooriTina Brower-Thomas
Keystone Connect Network is a proposed regional broadband network whose purpose is to increase educational opportunities and generate business growth. The backbone of this plan is the Pennsylvania Research and Education Network's (PennREN), a next generation high-speed internet network, managed by KINBER, which educational institutions can use to train their students and create new learning opportunities; and business can create new products and connect with their customers.
The Cyberlearning Resource Center (CRC) has responsibility for promoting integrative collaboration among cyberlearning grantees (across NSF programs); synthesis and national dissemination of cyberlearning findings, technologies, models, materials, and best practices; creating a national presence for Cyberlearning; helping the disparate Cyberlearning research and development communities coordinate efforts to build capacity; and providing infrastructure (technological and social) for supporting these efforts. Monitored through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, the CRC serves as a resource for all NSF grantees and programs with cyberlearning components, helping to promote synergy and integrate projects across NSF's cyberlearning investments. Among society's central challenges are amplifying, expanding, and transforming opportunities people have for learning and more effectively drawing in, motivating, and engaging young learners. Engaging actively as a citizen and productively in the workforce requires understanding a broad variety of concepts and possessing the ability to collaborate, learn, solve problems, and make decisions. Whether learning is facilitated in school or out of school, and whether learners are youngsters or adults, to develop such knowledge and capabilities, learners must be motivated to learn, actively engage over the long term in learning activities, and put forth sustained cognitive and social effort. Consistent with NSF's mission and strategic plan, a variety of programs at NSF invest in research aimed towards achieving these goals. In support of this important thematic thrust, the Cyberlearning Resource Center works with researchers and NSF program officers to identify and disseminate findings from across programs and projects; develop ways to broker productive partnerships and collaborations; convene meetings for purposes of envisioning the future, integrating findings, and building capacity,; and monitor the cyberlearning portfolio and its influences and impacts.
EvalFest (Evaluation Use, Value, and Learning through Festivals of Science and Technology) will test innovative evaluation methods in science festivals that are being held across the country and assess in what ways and how effectively they are used. Morehead Planetarium and Science Center (at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) and the University of California, San Francisco, in collaboration with over twenty science festivals, will (1) investigate whether a multisite evaluation approach is an effective model for creating common metrics for informal STEM education, (2) develop common methods to measure the effects of Festivals, (3) create a query-able database of 50,000 Festival attendees to share with the informal STEM learning field, and (4) document whether these efforts also result in new knowledge related to informal STEM education. The project will develop the Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) system and query-able database for the festival community. EFMs are systems, including processes and software, that enable groups (such as the festival network) to collect, organize, analyze and share data. The EFM system will be designed to integrate data across sites and to allow users to extract data of interest. The project will refine evaluation tools currently used within the Science Festival Alliance that assess self-reported festival learning, and the effects of festival attendance, motivation, and future science participation. It will collect economic impact data and longitudinal festival attendee data. The project will also develop some new evaluation tools such as secret shopper observational protocols. Data from festival attendees will be collected onsite at participating festivals.
Making Stuff Season Two is designed to build on the success of the first season of Making Stuff by expanding the series content to include a broader range of STEM topics, creating a larger outreach coalition model and a “community of practice,” and developing new outreach activities and digital resources. Specifically, this project created a national television 4-part miniseries, an educational outreach campaign, expanded digital content, promotion activities, station relations, and project evaluation. These project components help to achieve the following goals: 1. To increase public understanding that basic research leads to technological innovation; 2. To increase and sustain public awareness and excitement about innovation and its impact on society; and 3. To establish a community of practice that enhances the frequency and quality of collaboration among STEM researchers and informal educators. These goals were selected in order to address a wider societal issue, and an important element of the overall mission of NOVA: to inspire new generations of scientists, learners, and innovators. By creating novel and engaging STEM content, reaching out to new partners, and developing new outreach tools, the second season of Making Stuff is designed to reach new target audiences including underserved teens and college students crucial to building a more robust and diversified STEM workforce pipeline. Series Description: In this four-part special, technology columnist and best-selling author David Pogue takes a wild ride through the cutting-edge science that is powering a next wave of technological innovation. Pogue meets the scientists and engineers who are plunging to the bottom of the temperature scale, finding design inspiration in nature, and breaking every speed limit to make tomorrow's "stuff" "Colder," "Faster," "Safer," and "Wilder." Making Stuff Faster Ever since humans stood on two feet we have had the basic urge to go faster. But are there physical limits to how fast we can go? David Pogue wants to find out, and in "Making Stuff Faster," he’ll investigate everything from electric muscle cars and the America’s cup sailboat to bicycles that smash speed records. Along the way, he finds that speed is more than just getting us from point A to B, it's also about getting things done in less time. From boarding a 737 to pushing the speed light travels, Pogue's quest for ultimate speed limits takes him to unexpected places where he’ll come face-to-face with the final frontiers of speed. Making Stuff Wilder What happens when scientists open up nature's toolbox? In "Making Stuff Wilder," David Pogue explores bold new innovations inspired by the Earth's greatest inventor, life itself. From robotic "mules" and "cheetahs" for the military, to fabrics born out of fish slime, host David Pogue travels the globe to find the world’s wildest new inventions and technologies. It is a journey that sees today's microbes turned into tomorrow’s metallurgists, viruses building batteries, and ideas that change not just the stuff we make, but the way we make our stuff. As we develop our own new technologies, what can we learn from billions of years of nature’s research? Making Stuff Colder Cold is the new hot in this brave new world. For centuries we've fought it, shunned it, and huddled against it. Cold has always been the enemy of life, but now it may hold the key to a new generation of science and technology that will improve our lives. In "Making Stuff Colder," David Pogue explores the frontiers of cold science from saving the lives of severe trauma patients to ultracold physics, where bizarre new properties of matter are the norm and the basis of new technologies like levitating trains and quantum computers. Making Stuff Safer The world has always been a dangerous place, so how do we increase our odds of survival? In "Making Stuff Safer," David Pogue explores the cutting-edge research of scientists and engineers who want to keep us out of harm’s way. Some are countering the threat of natural disasters with new firefighting materials and safer buildings. Others are at work on technologies to thwart terrorist attacks. A next-generation vaccine will save millions from deadly disease. And innovations like smarter cars and better sports gear will reduce the risk of everyday activities. We’ll never eliminate danger—but science and technology are making stuff safer.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
WGBH Educational FoundationPaula Apsell
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This award is funded under NSF's Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) activities, which aim to address the challenges of creating a sustainable world. Research Coordination Network (RCN) CE3SAR (Climate, Energy, Environment, and Engagement in Semiarid Regions) is a comprehensive partnership of researchers at South Texas regional institutions and major research universities elsewhere advancing knowledge of science, engineering and education for sustainability (SEES). The network will develop and test an innovative model for conducting interdisciplinary, region-specific, sustainability research closely tied to the needs and interests of highly-engaged local stakeholders. RCN CE3SAR will aggregate regional research capacities specific to sustainability in semiarid climates contiguous to the Gulf of Mexico while leveraging research expertise infused from outside the region. Geographic information science (GIS) will play a key role in the process of integrating layers of scientific data, producing scientific insight and presenting new ideas, new research directions and new scientific knowledge to regional stakeholders as well as the scientific community. The network will align regional capacities that heretofore were largely disconnected and bring focus and synergy to a range of research that will profoundly impact the region and its socioeconomic future. The network will engage and educate regional communities, government and private-sector stakeholders throughout the process.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Luis CifuentesJorge VanegasGary JeffressRudolph RosenWesley Patrick
Research shows that participation and interest in science starts to drop as youth enter high school. This is also the point when science becomes more complex and there is increased need for content knowledge, mathematics capability, and computer or computational knowledge. Evidence suggests that youth who participate in original scientific research are more likely to enter and maintain a career in science as compared to students who do not have these experiences. We know young people get excited by space science. This project (STEM-ID) is informed by previous work in which high school students were introduced to scientific research and contributed to the search for pulsars. Students were able to develop the required science and math knowledge and computer skills that enabled them to successfully participate. STEM-ID builds on this previous work with two primary goals: the replication of the local program into a distributed program model and an investigation of the degree to which authentic research experiences build strong science identities and research self-efficacies. More specifically the project will support (a) significant geographic expansion to institutions situated in communities with diverse populations allowing substantial inclusion of under-served groups, (b) an online learning and discovery environment that will support the participation of youth throughout the country via online activities, and (c) opportunities for deeper participation in research and advancement within the research community. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. STEM-ID will serve 2000 high school youth and 200 high school teachers in afterschool clubs with support from 30 undergraduate and graduate students and 10 college/university faculty. Exploratory educational research will determine the broad mechanisms by which online activities and in-person and online peer-mentor teacher-scientist interactions influence science identity, self-efficacy, motivation, and career intentions, as well as a focused understanding of the mechanisms that influence patterns of participation. Youth will be monitored longitudinally through the first two years of college to provide an understanding of the long-term effects of out-of-class science enrichment programs on STEM career decisions. These studies will build an understanding of the best practices for enhancing STEM persistence in college through engagement in authentic STEM programs before youth get to college. In addition to the benefits of the education research, this program may lead participants to discover dozens of new pulsars. These pulsars will be used for fundamental advances such as for testing of general relativity, constraining neutron star masses, or detecting gravitational waves. The resulting survey will also be sensitive to transient signals such as sporadic pulsars and extragalactic bursts. This project provides a potential model for youth from geographical disparate places to participate in authentic research experiences. For providers, it will offer a model for program delivery with lower costs. Findings will support greater understanding of the mechanisms for participation in STEM. This work is being led by West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Participating sites include California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, El Paso Community College, Howard University, Montana State University, Penn State University, Texas Tech University, University of Vermont, University of Washington, and Vanderbilt University.
As a part of the strategy to reach the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Science Education and Public Outreach Forum Objective 1.2: Provide resources and opportunities to enable sharing of best practices relevant to SMD education and public outreach (E/PO), the Informal Education Working Group members designed a nationally-distributed online survey to answer the following questions: 1. How, when, where, and for how long do informal educators prefer to receive science, mathematics, engineering, and/or technology content professional development? 2. What are the professional development and
AccessComputing is a NSF-funded Broadening Participation in Computing alliance with the goal of increasing the participation and success of people with disabilities in computing fields. AccessComputing is in its 10th year of funding. It supports students with disabilities from across the country in reaching critical junctures toward college and careers by providing advice, resources, mentoring opportunities, professional contacts, and funding for tutoring, internships, and computing conferences. For educators and employers, it offers institutes and workshops to build awareness of universal design and accommodation strategies, and to aid in recruiting and supporting students with disabilities through the development of inclusive programs and education on promising practices.
The Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency's National Digital Stewardship Residency in New York (NDSR-NY) addresses the library profession's lack of staff who are trained to successfully acquire, manage, and preserve digital materials. The three-year project builds on the pilot program (NSDR) developed by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. It will support 10 students in gaining skills and experience to begin successful careers in digital stewardship; increase the number of skilled professionals; and help replicate the model residency program across the country. The NDSR-NY project will transform the landscape of certificate programs by using a blended approach that combines education with practical, hands-on work and by bringing together best practices to build a tested curriculum that teaches core competencies.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Margo Padilla
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Harvard Library's Testing the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR-MA) Model in Massachusetts will test the pilot program (NSDR-DC) developed by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to help 10 students gain the skills, experience, and network to begin successful careers in digital stewardship; to increase the number of skilled digital stewardship professionals; and to aid replication of the model residency program across the country. Students will gain both theoretical understanding and real world experience while host institutions will gain experience, training materials, new tools, professional relationships, and staff. The digital stewardship community at large will have more well-trained and networked professionals and future leaders along with curriculum and training materials to help tackle today's nationwide preservation and curation challenges.