Planning for a permanent exhibition examining the role of horse-drawn vehicles in American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A World Before Cars represents the latest phase of a major redesign of the LIM’s carriage museum, which contains one of the largest and finest holdings of horse-drawn vehicles and related transportation artifacts in the country. Utilizing the expertise of skilled consultants and the highly-regarded H. Lee Skolnick Architecture and Design Partnership, the LIM will plan an interpretive gallery composed of hands-on activity areas that explore the experiences of carriage riding/driving, the integral role of horses in 19th-century America, and the ways in which carriage design innovations informed and influenced automobile design. From a ride simulation exercise to interactive computer kiosks and a comparative display of carriage and automobile parts, this new gallery will be designed to engage a variety of different visitor age and experience levels, providing an immersive entry into the world of carriages, and the unexpected ways in which they connect to our modern lives.
As the world is increasingly dependent upon computing and computational processes associated with data analysis, it is essential to gain a better understanding of the visualization technologies that are used to make meaning of massive scientific data. It is also essential that the infrastructure, the very means by which technologies are developed for improving the public's engagement in science itself, be better understood. Thus, this AISL Innovations in Development project will address the critical need for the public to learn how to interpret and understand highly complex and visualized scientific data. The project will design, develop and study a new technology platform, xMacroscope, as a learning tool that will allow visitors at the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Center of Science and Industry, to create, view, understand, and interact with different data sets using diverse visualization types. The xMacroscope will support rapid research prototyping of public experiences at selected exhibits, such as collecting data on a runner's speed and height and the visualized representation of such data. The xMacroscope will provide research opportunities for exhibit designers, education researchers, and learning scientists to study diverse audiences at science centers in order to understand how learning about data through the xMacroscope tool may inform definitions of data literacy. The research will advance the state of the art in visualization technology, which will have broad implications for teaching and learning of scientific data in both informal and formal learning environments. The project will lead to better understanding by science centers on how to present data to the public more effectively through visualizations that are based upon massive amounts of data. Technology results and research findings will be disseminated broadly through professional publications and presentations at science, education, and technology conferences. The 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. The project is driven by the assumption that in the digital information age, being able to create and interpret data visualizations is an important literacy for the public. The research will seek to define, measure, and advance data visualization literacy. The project will engage the public in using the xMacrocope at the Science Museum of Minnesota and at the Center of Science and Industry's (COSI) science museum and research center in Columbus, Ohio. In both museum settings the public will interact with different datasets and diverse types of visualizations. Using the xMacroscope platform, personal attributes and capabilities will be measured and personalized data visualizations will be constructed. Existing theories of learning (constructivist and constructionist) will be extended to capture the learning and use of data visualization literacy. In addition, the project team will conduct a meta-review related to different types of literacy and will produce a definition with performance measures to assess data visualization literacy - currently broadly defined in the project as the ability to read, understand, and create data visualizations. The research has potential for significant impact in the field of science and technology education and education research on visual learning. It will further our understanding of the nature of data visualization literacy learning and define opportunities for visualizing data in ways that are both personally and culturally meaningful. The project expects to advance the understanding of the role of personalization in the learning process using iterative design-based research methodologies to advance both theory and practice in informal learning settings. An iterative design process will be applied for addressing the research questions by correlating visualizations to individual actions and contributions, exploring meaning-making studies of visualization construction, and testing the xMacroscope under various conditions of crowdedness and busyness in a museum context. The evaluation plan is based upon a logic model and the evaluation will iteratively inform the direction, process, and productivity of the project.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. This study will capitalize on the increased availability and affordability of immersive interactive technologies, such as Augmented Reality devices and virtual characters, to investigate their potential for benefitting STEM learning in informal museum contexts. This project will combine these technologies to create an Augmented Reality experience that will allow middle-school youth and their families to meet and assist a virtual crew on a historic ship at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. The players in this game-like experience will encounter technologies from the turn of the 20th century, including steam power, electricity, and wireless communication. Crew members and technologies will be brought to life aboard the USS Olympia, the largest and fastest ship in the US Navy launched in 1892. The historic context will be positioned in relation to current day technologies in ways that will enable a change in interest towards technology and engineering in middle school-age youth. This will result in a testbed for the feasibility of facilitating short-term science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) identity change with interactive immersive technologies. A successful feasibility demonstration, as well as the insights into design, could open up novel ways of fostering STEM interest and identity in informal learning contexts and of demonstrating the impact of this approach. The potential benefit to society will rest in the expected results on the basic science regarding immersive interactive technologies in informal learning contexts as well as in demonstrating the feasibility of the integrated approach to assessment.
This project will use a living lab methodology to evaluate interactive immersive technologies in terms of their support for STEM identity change in middle-school age youth. The two-year design-based research will iteratively develop and improve the measurement instrument for the argument that identity change is a fundamental to learning. A combination of Augmented Reality and intelligent virtual agents will be used to create an interactive experience--a virtual living lab--in an informal museum learning exhibit that enables change interests towards technology and engineering and provides short-term assessment tools. In collaboration with the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, the testbed for the approach will be an experience that brings to life the technologies of the early 20th century aboard a historic ship. Through the application of Participatory Action Research techniques, intelligent virtual agents interacting with youth and families will customize STEM information relating to the ship's mission and performance. Topics explored will make connections with current day technologies and scientific understanding. Mixed-methods will be used to analyze interactions, interview and survey data, will form the basis for assessing the impact on youth's STEM interests. The elicitation method specifically includes assessment metrics that are relevant to the concept of learning as identity change. This assessment, through immersive interactive technologies, will target the priority areas of engagement in STEM as well as the measurement of outcomes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Stefan RankAyana AllenGlen MuschioAroutis FosterKapil Dandekar
How do afterschool programs view their local public libraries? Are they working with them, and in what ways? These are the questions that the Afterschool Alliance, along with its partners at the Space Science Institute’s National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL) and the American Library Association, wanted to answer. Overall, our goal is to build bridges between the afterschool and library fields, so that both can share knowledge and resources to better serve our youth. While our work together has primarily focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education through
Multitouch tables and displays provide important benefits for users in museums and other public spaces. This report discusses the evolution of tangible-object interfaces on such displays and outlines ideas for further development of more compelling, intuitive, and effective user experiences.
In 2012, the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an exhibition utilizing objects from the former Museum of Questionable Medical Devices (QMDs), contextualizing them in the greater conversation about scientific skepticism and how people make healthcare decisions. The resulting exhibition, Weighing the Evidence, opened in December 2015. This kt, object-based exhibition is organized into four islands of artifacts with accompanying information and hands-on “Try It” interactives, which allow visitors to experience some
This article will consider the alignment of scientific and media practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over several decades after 1817 certain instrument makers began to specialise in the domestic entertainment market, transferring skills from optical instrument manufacture to the design of fashionable novelty devices. The instrument trade was expanding into a new middle-class market to exploit an increasing popular trade in optical novelties, exemplified by the 1817 Kaleidoscope craze and new interest among the middle classes for microscopes, telescopes, and magic lanterns
This article traces sound as it echoes through approaches to displaying the Science Museum’s acoustics collection over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on three key moments in the collection’s historical development, the article explores the role of sound as both medium and object of museum display. Each moment exposes how the practice of using sound to interpret sounding objects was articulated and problematised by past generations of museum practitioners. Each moment, too, exposes the problem of sound as a potential threat to the cultural politics of a national museum
The Hugh Davies Collection (HDC) at the Science Museum in London comprises 42 items of electronic sound apparatus owned by English experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005), including self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments and modified sound production and manipulation hardware. An early proponent of ‘live electronic music’ (performed live on stage rather than constructed on magnetic tape in a studio), Davies’s DIY approach shaped the development of experimental and improvised musics from the late 1960s onwards. However, his practice has not been widely reported in the literature
This article examines the 1935 Science Museum temporary exhibition on Noise Abatement, situating it in the sound historical context of inter-war Britain, and making an argument that the ‘way of hearing’ it advanced was part of an attempt to shape auditory perception in the interests of a class-bound culture of acoustic civilization. Further, the article uses this exhibition to mount an argument that museum scholars should consider sound not simply as a medium of engagement, but also as a politically interested and socially active field.
This article considers the design and production of spectacles in Britain following the introduction of standardised frame styles under the National Health Service. NHS spectacles were provided as a functional, durable medical appliance to be delivered cost-effectively and there was no explicit concern for fashion or the patient experience. The actions of the government and professional bodies greatly affected the trade in eyewear and thus restricted opportunities for innovative design and consumer choice. Within the range of state regulation frames there was no active concern for ‘design’ in
In January 1885, the Glaswegian Professor of Chemistry Dr Robert Carter Moffat organised a special operatic concert at St James’s Hall, London, to which he invited around two thousand scientists and musicians. The point of this invitation concert was that all the singers used bottled air. Moffat himself appeared between the various performances, wielding his mysterious Ammoniaphone, or bottled-air machine, a long silver tube which he flourished in the faces of his audience while describing its virtues with considerable animation. The premise of the Ammoniaphone was that since Italian opera