The iSaveSpecies project, created by Project Dragonfly at Miami University and a consortium of zoos and aquariums, designed and implemented a socially-networked exhibit system to engage family visitors to zoos and aquariums in inquiry and conservation. The second wave of the iSaveSpecies exhibit stations focused on Sustaining Life, allowing families to conduct research and learn about conservation efforts. The Chicago Zoological Society/Brookfield Zoo incorporated two of these touchscreen-based kiosks in their Living Coast area exhibit.
In this report, we describe the impact of the kiosks
The iSaveSpecies project, created by Project Dragonfly at Miami University and a consortium of zoos, museums, and aquariums, designed and implemented a socially-networked exhibit system to engage family visitors to museums, zoos, and aquariums in inquiry and conservation. The second wave of the iSaveSpecies exhibit stations focused on Sustaining Life, allowing families to conduct research and learn about conservation efforts. The Boonshoft Museum incorporated three of these touchscreen-based research and action kiosks in their Mead Westvaco Hallway and Treehouse area exhibit.
In this
This commentary seeks to spark further discussion on the continuing professional development in science communication, presenting comments from practitioners who were asked to reflect on the competences and skills their profession requires, and to envisage what kind of training might provide them. This introduction presents some common issues that emerge within the comments: the necessity to face rapidly evolving professional landscapes, to answer to new missions and roles, to consider the growing impact and potential of new technologies. Alternative training methods are also discussed.
In late 2012, Providence Children’s Museum began a major three-year research project in collaboration with The Causality and Mind Lab at Brown University, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (1223777). Researchers at Brown examined how children develop scientific thinking skills and understand their own learning processes. The Museum examined what caregivers and informal educators understand about learning through play in its exhibits and how to support children’s metacognition – the ability to notice and reflect on their own thinking – and adults’ awareness and appreciation of kids’ thinking and learning through play. Drawing from fields like developmental psychology, informal education and museum visitor studies, the Museum’s exhibits team looked for indicators of children’s learning through play and interviewed parents and caregivers about what they noticed children doing in the exhibits, asking them to reflect on their children’s thinking. Based on the findings, the research team developed and tested new tools and activities to encourage caregivers to notice and appreciate the learning that takes place through play.
The letter compares and contrasts thinking about making science accessible and relevant to children in science centres and museums with thinking about communication in social history museums.
This study aims to investigate whether different types of museum visits have specific ways to influence the visitors' experience and learning. Three types of museum visits as offered by the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci" in Milan, Italy were taken into consideration: free tour, guided tour, and lab. The study involved visitors over 25 years of age. The way visits took place, the visitors' learning and experiences were investigated based on evidence collected using methods such as Personal Meaning Mapping and observation. Our study has revealed that the outcomes of
As a result of the large number of media used and a variety of objectives pursued by the various Public Communication of Science (PCS) activities, their evaluation turns into a daunting task. Therefore, a general taxonomy for all the approaches used by PCS could be helpful in order to differentiate their effects and to measure their results. A general format is proposed for a fast and easy evaluation of PCS efforts and to share a common language with all science communicators, who need to easily compare the results of this growing activity.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded OMSI funding during the spring of 2011 to create a 2,000 sq. ft. bilingual (English/Spanish) traveling exhibition exploring current research on the human microbiome and the impact of our resident microorganisms on our health. The exhibition was developed with the support of the J. Craig Venter Institute and other national experts in microbiome research. More information about the exhibition can be found at http://omsi.edu/exhibitions/zoo-in-you/. The Zoo in You Project Goals are to (1) Educate museum visitors and program participants about what
The REVEAL project is an NSF funded project to learn about how facilitation impacts family’s experiences of math exhibits. The goal of the project was to iteratively develop and refine a theoretical model of how staff facilitation deepens and extends family mathematical discourse at interactive exhibits. This model underwent rigorous testing and ultimately provided the evidence and research-based tools to support PD efforts for informal STEM educators. As part of this testing the learnings from developing at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, in Portland, Oregon) were applied in an
In 2012, the Conner Prairie Interactive History Park began work on the National Science Foundation-funded Prairie Science project. Its goal: to produce a framework for integrating informal science experiences into exhibitions, interpretation, and programs at historic sites and museums. From the outset, the core project team acknowledged that the task of integrating STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and history learning would challenge the norms of both disciplines and institutions. Conner Prairie is a history museum in Fishers, Indiana, with a long tradition of exploring novel
Museums today try to increase the public’s access to their collections in a variety of ways. Visible storage is one such popular method. However, there is little research done on what the public thinks about this kind of access. This study sought to understand visitor perceptions of visible storage methods in museums. Thirty visitors were interviewed in the Multiversity Gallery at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC. Results suggest that the majority of visitors understood the purpose of visible storage, and believe that it is very or extremely important for museums to provide access
The science education community is buzzing about STEM learning ecosystems, ecologies of learning, and ecological perspectives on learning. You may not know it, but if your teaching involves building on young people’s prior knowledge or making connections between the science curriculum and science in the broader world, your work may already reflect aspects of ecological learning theories. At the heart of an ecological perspective on learning is the need to make connections across formal, informal, and everyday learning. So, what are STEM learning ecologies all about, and how can science