Thanks so much Brian! I think one of the biggest observations we've made are how parents and other adults in the community have started to recognize that all of their children's everyday interests and activities, can be reframed through a lens of science -- what my colleague Dr. Tammy Clegg calls "scientizing" one's world. In that sense, we're observing how people in the community start to see less disconnect between school and out-of-school science, and more that we can think of all of our varied experiences through a science lens. We're hoping that this integration and synthesis can help communities broaden participation and include more local voices in the science learning process.

Hi Ashley!

Hopefully Tammy will get a chance to say hi soon. From my experience at the PNW site, families tend to be a bit more active around the displays during activities (like Family Science Night), but there's a certain amount of interaction over time, especially if new content is being posted regularly to attract folks to the displays. The students at the school we work with tend to visit the display during lulls between activities (in class, during after-school programs, etc.)

Currently the displays are located in school and church environments, libraries are also a good option. One of our largest displays is located in the library of the school we work with in the PNW. The school librarian has told us that the kids love seeing their friends on the display!

Thank you for your question and comment!

Hi Daniel, it's actually both. In order to create "scientizing" opportunities around the entire neighborhood, we had to create our own mobile social app and the public displays. We had considered Facebook, Twitter, Instagram API, but we found through co-design that users wanted to keep these separate from science practices. To encourage students to bring a science lens, we ask for all kinds of postings that they believe relate to science, we put scaffolding questions into the social media prompts, and we have badges that indicate science learning (curiosity, collaboration, investigator, and interesting). 

Hi Daniel, that is a great question. A substantial portion of our project is partnering with our local neighborhoods to facilitate and make visible, the variety of out-of-school learning programs in the neighborhood. We also work closely with teachers in the neighborhood public schools to implement our Science Everywhere model and technologies in the classroom. We find that these community and school components, are extremely necessary to provide rich settings for the kids to share about. In our work, we encourage learners to bring a science lens "everywhere" --- when they are in school they see the displays and use the app/displays for formal learning activiites, in community settings like the local church or after school program, they see the displays and interact with parents, neighbors, and other educators, and at home kids might quickly share something they're doing (like watching a basketball game) and post about their observations, wonderings, or connections to other ideas. We've been heartened to see that this kind of thinking through a science lens can be fostered neighborhood-wide, by making it ubiquitous, relevant, and connected to the people that learners care about (the folks in their neighborhood). Our technologies largely amplify and encourage those activities, but the source of the activities (for me) come from the local communities we partner with.

Have you had any challenges regarding the adoption of technology in different communities? - Yes, it's not easy to adopt social media technologies like this in schools. For instance, some schools lock down the camera on iPads, while other schools may have a "no smartphone" rule in place. These are factors we are exploring.

Have schools adopted the use of technology or your site to generate classroom discussions or activities related to science? - Yes, we've done a couple school implementations of our Science Everywhere technologies. We are focusing on seeing how teachers differ in their usage in comparison to say a church or an afterschool program. 

Have you been able to assess student engagement or motivation towards STEM as a project outcome? - Yes, we just had a paper published at Interaction Design and Children looking at funds of knowledge and what resources children use in STEM learning (http://bigyipper.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05...) and how learning moves across settings using social media (http://bigyipper.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05...)

 

 

We focused on local neighborhoods as communities. So one community was the local school and the surrounding families (Washington), while the other community was a church + school and the surrounding families (Maryland).

Hi, if you skim through the findings section of this paper, you'll see examples of the displays helping to connect families, teachers, and students about everyday science practices.

http://bigyipper.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01...

Hi Kris. Yes! A huge part of our project has been partnering with informal learning environments. We have not specifically worked with parks, zoos, and museums, but we partner directly with after-school programs (several of which further intersect with other informal learning settings). Our vision for this project is that any and all kinds of informal programs, formal schools, neighborhood groups, and home (families, parents etc.) can all start to be aware of young people's rich learning and coordinate support in more effective ways.