The informal STEM education (ISE) field is a landscape that includes a variety of institutions beyond schools, including museums, science centers, zoos, youth and adult organizations, documentary film producers—and public libraries (J. H. Falk, Randol, and Dierking 2012). Libraries across the country have been reimagining their community role and leveraging their resources and public trust to strengthen communnity-based learning and foster critical thinking, problem solving, and engagement in STEM.
Science and technology: these are the mainstays China wants to concentrate on in order to stabilise its future as an emerging world power. Beijing plans to have the whole, enormous Chinese population literate in the scientific field within a few years. Scientific popularization is the key to what now, due to political influences and deep social disparities, seems remote.