The McWane Science Center (MWSC) will create a new exhibition experience entitled “Dropping Science: Hip-Hop Interactive” that will capture the elements of the popular music genre using interpretive experiences. Project activities include exhibit content development; development of a formal evaluation plan; exhibit prototyping; remedial evaluation, and a final exhibit design plan. An important project goal is to develop the process for creating lasting, reciprocal relationships with the local African American community and throughout the region, thus creating an exhibit space that connects underrepresented audiences to STEM and establishes MWSC as a true community partner. The outcome of this project will be a new interactive experience that was co-developed with and representative of MWSC’s local community that helps MWSC connect with and engage local visitors in science through a more culturally and personally relevant lens.
This project is designed to support collaboration between informal STEM learning (ISL) researchers, designers, and educators with sound researchers and acoustic ecologists to jointly explore the role of auditory experiences—soundscapes—on learning. In informal STEM learning spaces, where conversation advances STEM learning and is a vital part of the experience of exploring STEM phenomena with family and friends, attention to the impacts of soundscapes can have an important bearing on learning. Understanding how soundscapes may facilitate, spark, distract from, or even overwhelm thinking and conversation will provide ISL educators and designers evidence to inform their practice. The project is structured to reflect the complexity of ISL audiences and experiences; thus, partners include the North Park Village Nature Center located in in a diverse immigrant neighborhood in Chicago; Wild Indigo, a Great Lakes Audubon program primarily serving African American visitors in Midwest cities; an after-school/summer camp provider, STEAMing Ahead New Mexico, serving families in the rural southwest corner of New Mexico, and four sites in Ohio, MetroParks, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Center of Science and Industry.
Investigators will conduct large-scale exploratory research to answer an understudied research question: How do environmental sounds impact STEM learning in informal learning spaces? Researchers and practitioners will characterize and describe the soundscapes throughout the different outdoor and indoor exhibit/learning spaces. Researchers will observe 800 visitors, tracking attraction, attention, dwell time, and shared learning. In addition to observations, researchers will join another 150 visitors for think-aloud interviews, where researchers will walk alongside visitors and capture pertinent notes while visitors describe their experience in real time. Correlational and cluster analyses using machine learning algorithms will be used to identify patterns across different sounds, soundscapes, responses, and reflections of research participants. In particular, the analyses will identify characteristics of sounds that correlate with increased attention and shared learning. Throughout the project, a team of evaluators will monitor progress and support continuous improvement, including guidance for developing culturally responsive research metrics co-defined with project partners. Evaluators will also document the extent to which the project impacts capacity building, and influences planning and design considerations for project partners. This exploratory study is the initial in a larger research agenda, laying the groundwork for future experimental study designs that test causal claims about the relationships between specific soundscapes and visitor learning. Results of this study will be disseminated widely to informal learning researchers and practitioners through workshops, presentations, journal articles, facilitated conversations, and a short film that aligns with the focus and findings of the research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Martha MersonJustin MeyerDaniel Shanahan
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Data science is ever-present in modern life. The need to learn with and about data science is becoming increasingly important in a world where the quantity of data is constantly growing, where one’s own data are often being harvested and marketed, where data science career opportunities are rapidly increasing, and where understanding statistics, data sources, and data representation is integral to understanding STEM and the world around us. Museums have the opportunity to play a critical role in introducing the public to data science concepts in ways that center personal relevance, social connections and collaborative learning. However, data science and statistics are difficult concepts to distill and provide meaningful engagement with during the brief learning experiences typical to science museums. This Pilot and Feasibility study brings together data scientists, data science educators, and museum exhibit designers to consider these questions:
What are the important data science concepts for the public to explore and understand in museum exhibits?
How can museum exhibits be designed to support visitors with diverse backgrounds and experiences to engage with these data science concepts?
What principles can shape these designs to promote broadening participation in data science specifically and STEM more broadly?
This Pilot and Feasibility project combines multidisciplinary expert convening, feasibility testing, and early exploratory prototyping around the focal topic of data science exhibits. Project partners, TERC, the Museum of Science, Boston, and The Tech Interactive in San Jose will engage in an iterative process to develop a theoretical grounding and practical guidance for museum practitioners. The project will include two convenings, bringing together teams of experts from the fields of data science, data science education and museum exhibit design. Prior to the first convening, an initial literature summary and a survey of convening participants will be conducted, culminating in a preliminary list of big ideas about data science. Periodically, participants will have the opportunity to rank, annotate and expand this list, as a form of ongoing data collection. During the convenings, participants will explore the preliminary list, share related work from the three disciplines, engage with related data science activities in small groups, and work together to build consensus around promising data science topics and approaches for exhibits. Participant evaluation will allow for iterative improvement of the convenings and the capture of missed points or overlooked topics. After each convening, museum partners will create prototypes that respond to the convening conversations. Prototypes will be pilot tested (evaluated) with an intentionally recruited group of families that includes both frequent visitors and those who are less likely to visit the museum; diversity in terms of race, languages and dis/ability will be reflected in selection. Pilot data collection will consist of structured observations and interviews. Results from the first round of prototyping will be shared with convening participants as a way to modify the list of big ideas and to further interrogate the feasibility of communicating these ideas in an exhibit format. Results from the convenings and from both rounds of prototyping will be combined in a guiding document that will be shared on all three partner websites, and more broadly with the informal STEM learning field. The team will also host a workshop for practitioners interested in designing data science exhibits, and present at a conference focused on museum exhibits and their design.
The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) will collaborate with four community organizations serving Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) audiences to research and develop a novel outdoor makerspace that engages families in STEM learning. A makerspace is a place where people work together on creative, interest driven projects. In working with BIPOC families, the project addresses three forms of historical (and present day) exclusion of community participants, including participation in the design of informal learning experiences, participation in such activities, and overall engagement in STEM. The project aims to develop activities that foster STEM learning using natural materials in an outdoor makerspace, informed through robust collaboration with local communities. This project will result in an outdoor makerspace at SMM that will include 3-4 settings (approximately 2500 square feet total) that house and support multiple making activities in an outdoor context. The proposed work will contribute to advancing knowledge through exploring how BIPOC families define learning in makerspaces and how younger children can be fully engaged in family learning. The project will share the inclusive design and community collaboration practices developed through this work with other museums, maker educators, and other community organizations that can develop or expand their own outdoor makerspaces in ways that will respect and reflect BIPOC families’ perspectives.
BIPOC families will join museum staff as contributors in the development and iteration of an outdoor makerspace and collaborators in the development of generalized design principles and dissemination of the research. Visitor-captured video of engagement in the outdoor makerspace, surveys, and memos from design meetings with community partners serve as the foundation for the process of aligning design and development of outdoor informal science education spaces with community needs and values. All research activities will be guided by a culturally responsive research framework and use strategies to ensure the multicultural validity such as video meaning-making with family research participants and member-checking instruments, data analyses, and findings with Design Partners. Project research will address three questions: (1) What are the characteristics of family learning in an outdoor nature-situated makerspace, including how BIPOC families identify and describe STEM learning and how outdoor spaces can be built to support BIPOC families’ perspectives? (2) How can the space be built to support multi-age families to engaged in making, including a focus on what design elements support preschool learner’s engagement and sustained participation by other family members? and (3) How do the design principles for making with widely available materials translate from indoor to outdoor spaces and materials? Research findings, design principles and community engagement guides will be widely disseminated to researchers, designers, program developers, informal science institutions and community organizations.
The Northwest Passage Project explored the changing Arctic through an innovative expedition aboard the Swedish Icebreaker Oden to conduct groundbreaking ocean science research, while it actively engaged 22 undergraduate and graduate students from the project’s five Minority Serving Institution (MSI) partners and 2 early career Inuit researchers in the research at sea. Over 35 hours of training in Arctic research techniques, polar science, and science communication was provided to these participants, who were engaged in the Northwest Passage expedition and worked with the onboard science team
This book includes accounts going back to the 1970s of efforts to engage visitors as contributors to exhibitions and active participants in museum conversations. Included are 27 essays by practioners from children’s museums and science centers, natural history museums and art galleries, history museums and living collections. The book offers practical guidance and concludes with reflections on the value and meaning of visitor contributions to exhibitions. Co-editor Pollock poses a question that in retrospect seems prescient: "Finally, have we considered carefully enough the possible downsides
Artificial intelligence (AI) is in many of our everyday activities—from unlocking phones to running Internet searches to parking cars. Yet, most instruction on how AI works is only in computer science courses. The unique role that AI plays in making decisions that affect human lives heightens the need for education approaches that promote public AI literacy. Little research has been done to understand how we can best teach AI in informal learning spaces. This project will engage middle school age youth in learning abouts AI through interaction with museum exhibits in science and technology centers. The exhibits employ embodied interactions and creative making activities that involve textiles, music making, and interactive media. The research will build on three exhibit prototypes that teach about concepts including bias in data in machine learning, AI decision-making processes, and how AI represents knowledge. Female-identifying and Title 1 youth will be recruited as participants during the exhibit design iterations and testing. 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
Researchers will explore two key research questions: 1) How can the design of interactive museum exhibits encourage interest development in and learning about AI among learners without a Computer Science background by using embodiment and creative making? and 2) How do embodied interaction and creative making mediate learning about AI in informal learning environments? The project will take a design-based research approach, iteratively building on existing exhibit prototypes and testing them in-situ with learners. Data sources and modes of analysis will include retrospective surveys to assess interest, content knowledge gain, creativity, learning talk analysis of audio recordings, and coding of embodied movements in video recordings. Learning talk analysis will identify instances of joint sensemaking during naturalistic interactions with our exhibit to reveal connections between sensemaking talk; learners' behaviors and embodied actions during real-time collaborative knowledge building; and outcomes in knowledge, interest, and creativity measures as elicited in retrospective surveys. The final set of exhibits will be rigorously evaluated with over 500 museum visitors. The key contributions of this work will include a set of rigorously tested exhibits, publicly available exhibit designs, a set of design guidelines for developing AI literacy museum exhibits, and an improved understanding of the relationship between AI-related learning and interest development, embodiment, and creativity.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Brian MagerkoDuri LongJessica Roberts
The Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites will create a hands-on, immersive experience about legendary African American cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor. The exhibit will feature a 1900-era locker room, a bicycle shop that demonstrates how bike design impacts performance, and three trophies Taylor won overseas. Visitors will be able to assemble bicycles and participate in an animated race. The museum will collaborate with The Indianapolis Public Library’s Center for Black Literature and Culture, US Bicycling Hall of Fame, Bike Indianapolis, and Central Indiana Bicycling Association. The exhibit will increase awareness of Major Taylor, his achievements, and his connections to Indianapolis and Indiana, and will provide a shared experience focused on race and our ongoing struggle for social justice. Visitors can contemplate and take action around bike equity, access to affordable transportation, and urban design, explore cycling and ride bicycles together.
The Field Museum of Natural History will present “Changing Face of Science,” an exhibition series targeting pre-teens and teenagers and featuring Field Museum scientists and science educators who are women or people of color. Over three years, the museum will mount six exhibitions that highlight the experiences and work of museum scientists from diverse backgrounds in a range of disciplines. Programming will include on-site field trips and virtual events during which students and educators will interact with featured researchers. By presenting the stories of individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in scientific fields, the museum will provide role models who will show that science is accessible and inspire a diverse group of future scientists.
Creative Discovery Museum will create an indoor/outdoor, natural science gallery designed for children ages 2 to 12. Named “Unearthed,” the gallery will include exhibits on fossil layers, dinosaurs and paleontology, volcanos and volcanology, erosion and weathering, entomology, and insects. It will offer hands-on, exploratory experiences in natural science for children and their families. The new science gallery will align with state educational standards, provide more interactive learning experiences, and introduce children to real elements including dirt, water, and sand in an outdoor exhibit that reinforces the concepts presented inside the museum.
The Marine Discovery Center, a new, interactive 16,000 sq. ft. exhibition space will replace Feiro Marine Life Center’s existing 40-year-old facility. The planning of this accessible exhibition experience will prioritize engaging visitor connections to the ocean environment by improving scientific literacy skills, increasing awareness of historical and recent regional Tribal knowledge, encouraging stewardship actions in the marine environment, and developing deeper understandings of important local species. The Marine Discovery Center is a joint venture of Feiro Marine Life Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
Kidzeum of Health and Science will partner with Springfield, Illinois School District 186 to create a two-week STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) residency for approximately 1,000 second graders in the district. The residency will take place at Kidzeum during the 2021-2022 school year. The program will include a curriculum created by teachers, school administrators, and museum staff, featuring a collaborative STEAM project that builds on Kidzeum exhibit content. Literacy, physical education, music, social studies, and social-emotional wellness will also be included in the curriculum as the Kidzeum tests the hypothesis that museums can benefit young learners and their families by serving as a place for longer term, immersive education programs. Southern Illinois University School of Medicine will provide project evaluation and subsequent reporting.