Our team is highlighting our IMLS-funded STEM Pillars project on the STEM for All Video Hall. Our 3-minute video describes our design-based research project where we are working with rural libraries and museums to create programs to help smaller institutions serve their communities.
Our team from Penn State’s College of Education in partnership with the Schlow Centre Region Library, the Centre County Library, Discovery Space of Central Pennsylvania, and Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center received a federal research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Together, we will explore how to best support family science learning as we work with STEM professionals from Penn State University, local businesses, and a rural county agency.
The project will use design-based research methods to iteratively develop family workshops on five personally relevant science themes that foster science conversations and intergenerational learning:
The research team will examine questions including, How can intergenerational library and museum experiences use STEM expert narratives effectively to make the science present in the community more visible and relevant? The project will result in a model for personally relevant informal education that brings together community science topics, hands-on inquiry, and personal stories from STEM experts in order to help museum and library professionals learn where and how to place STEM experts’ stories within programs; engage parents in their children’s learning; and position children as knowledge builders in STEM content areas.
Chris Gamrat, Simon Hooper and Heather Zimmerman have a new article in TechTrends about digital photography in informal learning environments:
Parents and children are rapidly adopting mobile technologies, yet designs for mobile devices that serve a communication function to connect parents to children’s out-of-school time activities are limited. As a result, our team designed the Digital Postcard Maker so that children attending summer camps can create digital photographs to send home to their parents. These digital postcards help to connect children’s home life with out-of-school learning experiences and also support 21st Century Skills’ media literacy practices. The research design included two iterations of a design-based research project with 58 children from 55 families. Design implications related to supporting informal science learning with mobile computing relying on digital photography are shared, including (i) the need for additional support to transform an out-of-school recreational activity into an out-of-school learning activity, and (ii) the utility of photographs as a means to connect parents and children to talk about environmental sciences topics.
If you do not have access to a university library, you can download the article here on our website: 2014_Zimmerman_Gamrat_Hooper_TechTrends.
