Inquiry Groups are central to the work of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Using NSF-funded projects, programs, and products as the subject of inquiry, participants with a diverse set of expertises meet together to examine and discuss an issue or theme in ISE practice, then prepare knowledge products that document their observations and reflections. UPCLOSE led the first of these Inquiry Groups.
The main focus of this inquiry group was figuring out how to conceptualize and evaluate successful professional online learning communities, especially those serving multidisciplinary informal science education (ISE) communities. A second goal was to exercise the new ISE Evaluation Framework Guidelines by putting the Framework into practice with example research designs, instruments and metrics to assess the impact of recently funded professional online communities like ExhibitFiles, InformalScience.org and InSci.org.
Click! Urban adventure was the final project in the explanatoids series of multi media education. Click!2005 was a mixed reality game for middle school girls. The girls used the city as a game board and science, math, and technology as their tools.
In June of 2005, after five weeks of agency training in technology and science, the girls became official Click! Agents and were given their first task: to help solve a mystery involving unusual water quality readings, which were discovered by Click! Agent, Roxy Robin. Roxy is the lead singer of the Songbirds and a Click! Environmental Specialist. Her discovery of this pollution may be the work of one madman, a bunch of crazy pranksters, or it may be a dark conspiracy that penetrates the very depths of Pittsburgh society.
The problem that the girls investigated is a real issue facing Pittsburgh today. Currently, when rain or snow bring additional water into the sewage system, the extra water overloads the pipes and causes raw sewage to be deposited with the extra water into the rivers; this is known as combined sewage overflow (CSO). The mystery surrounds devices that trigger toilets around the North Side of Pittsburgh to flush simultaneously, resulting in elevated readings of the pollution in Pittsburgh's rivers.
We conducted a follow-up study with Click!2005 participants to assess the impact of the program in the time since its completion. In particular, we examined whether the identities and skills the girls developed while role-playing as Click! Agents continue to influence their views of science and technology.
In 2004, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh completed a large-scale expansion, increasing its space from 20,000 to 80,000 square feet. With the expansion, the Museum saw an opportunity to promote more parent-child interaction through a redesigned Art Studio space and a new Interactive Art area with original artworks. The Art Studio contains a wide variety of realistic art supplies and artistic processes including painting, clay, papermaking, silkscreening, and monoprinting. Distributed throughout the museum are Interactive Art pieces, which are commissioned artworks by local and national artists designed to allow visitors to be hands-on with original works of art.
Initial research suggested that the adults enjoy interacting with the exhibits and their children in these two art-related spaces. In the fall of 2006, researchers from UPCLOSE began a research project to investigate how the Children's Museum's Art Studio and Interactive Art Hallway encourage parent-child interaction in children's art experiences. In addition, UPCLOSE used this opportunity to learn more about parent beliefs about viewing and making art and about the role they play in encouraging their child's artistic development.
For this study, researchers observed the types of interactions that take place at selected exhibits within the Art Studio and the Interactive Art Hallway. Parents were interviewed to find out how they interacted with their child, what features of the exhibit encouraged this type of interaction, and what role they felt that they played in their child's exhibit experience. Surveys and interviews were also used to discover parent's beliefs about key issues in art education such as: product vs. process, whether collaboration stifles a child's creativity, exposure to a variety of materials vs. intense training in one medium, and the impact of criticism.
The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh and UPCLOSE developed a set of online games 
to research their effectiveness as educational tools and to increase children's use of the CMoP web site. The two games are Build-A-Monster, an interactive narrative that allows children to explore the museum to help a disconnected stuffed monster get back to the right shape, and Build-A-Fountain a puzzle game that challenges players to build more and more complicated water fountains similar to the museums fountain exhibit.
We worked in close partnership with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh on a three-year project to facilitate and document change as the museum expanded its building, programming, and mission. This project resulted in a book, a year-long intensive and extensive study of visitors' experiences, and materials for professional development for the Museum's staff.
From our ongoing research partnership with the Children's Museum, the idea emerged to document and analyze the museum's organization, beliefs and practices as they completed a $28 million expansion project. The Museum willingly opened its doors, file cabinets, and board room to scrutiny of its daily practices at all levels to document the story of this expansion process.
By looking behind the scenes at the Children's Museum, we uncoveedr issues concerning expertise and accountability, and organizational structure and change. The museum field has operated for many years with a professionalization practice that draws participants from divergent fields who have little understanding of other roles within the museum. There is a growing understanding that expertise from all areas of museum staff is required to create successful museum experiences, and the field is moving towards team-based development projects. The documentation of the Children's Museum expansion project will serve to assist in the training of museum professionals.
At the same time, museums are expanding and growing at an unprecedented rate. The Children's Museum is one of the leaders in its field in terms of innovative practices in the areas of exhibition development and community-based partnerships. The study and documentation of this particular project, from new building and exhibitions, to visitor's experiences in the first year of operation provided a unique record for anyone interested in the workings of museums, as well as providing a benchmark document for the field of children's museums.
Explanatoids was a multi-media project of UPCLOSE, Carnegie Mellon University School of Design, and the Girls, Math & Science Partnership. From 2002 to 2005 this collaboration produced "explanatoids" in seven Pittsburgh locations. The explanatoids consisted of signage, newspaper ads, videos, cards and games that were "girl friendly" media about the science behind "real world" questions in public places around Pittsburgh.
For example, at a popular roller coaster at Kennywood Park, three signs — "The Scream Team," "No Engine? No Way!" and "Choose Your Adventure" — were currently on display in the queue area. Research on the effectiveness of these signs showed that they are successful in stimulating curiosity about the science behind the rollercoaster. We hoped this curiosity would encourage girls, (and boys) to pursue other questions in the fields of science mathematics, technology and engineering.
The character-driven explanatoids signage was the result of an in-depth study of over 3,000 families and serves as a platform from which parents, educators and mentors can begin to talk with young women about the opportunities available to them in the world of science. The GMSP aims to bolster "community conversations" around each explanatoids sign, which brings science outside the classroom and into Pittsburgh's neighborhoods.
Explanatoids aims to cultivate young women's curiosity by helping them explore math and science by discovering their questions and interest in the world around them. Funded and inspired by the work of the Heinz Endowments and the Alcoa Foundation, the GMSP is part of a unique collaboration that pulls partners from the private, public and educational sectors. The explanatoids project is funded under a grant from the National Science Foundation and is a collaboration involving students from Carnegie Mellon University School of Design and educational assessment researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. To learn more about this project visit the explanatoids website »
The Glass Ceiling Project focuses on the limits of children's knowledge on a specific topic in which they are intensely interested. Based on our work investigating how islands of expertise influence parent-child learning patterns, we encountered a surprising phenomenon. Expert children and their parents in the domain of dinosaurs seem to be encountering a 'glass ceiling' of available information about their topic of interest. We investigated the possibility that many dinosaur information resources designed for young children repeat many of the same facts and stories especially about the most popular dinosaur species like Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus. Once child-experts and their families master the information available to them in the cognitive ecology presented in books, DVDs, television programs, play sets and online, they may struggle to find new information to support their children's interest. As a result, child-expert dinosaur knowledge may become tightly organized according to categorical structures or popular anecdotes and remain disconnected from the development of other biological or paleontology knowledge because these connections are not provided in the available learning resources.
How do we provide parents and children with the mechanisms to break through this barrier and instead use their knowledge as a platform for learning? In order to investigate the knowledge that is available through these different resources, UPCLOSE decided to focus on the knowledge that children can develop about dinosaurs. Using dinosaurs as our focus, we read and coded 35 different dinosaur books divided into four different categories: dinosaur as simply a character, narrative, informative, and religion and dinosaurs. These texts were chosen based on their classification into one of the four above categories as well as their inclusion on the top 50 books sold by Amazon.com and found in Barnes and Nobles. By systematically choosing these texts, we captured a picture of what texts any dinosaur kid would have in his/her house. Through our coding, we determined the type of information provided in these texts as well as the sophistication of the information in order to find the amount and level of information a child could learn if exposed to all 35 texts. The next stage of our project was to look at dinosaur videos and analyze these in a similar fashion. Finally, we turned our attention to dinosaur toys and models. We hoped to be able to vividly describe the type of knowledge these resources supply as well as the limitations to the resources that are available to dinosaur kids.
In 2005, UPCLOSE worked with an older adult advocacy group, SPRY, in order to study grandparent-grandchild conversations and intergenerational learning. UPCLOSE was particularly interested in whether older adults and children talked to each other differently depending on whether they were in a different learning environment.
Our research team looked at grandparent-grandchild conversations about heart health in a museum exhibition hall and a researcher-created website. They also examined grandparents' views of the two settings. The project was meant to help the field think about whether assumptions about how learning conversations take place extend to locations outside of museums and to other audiences besides parents.
We found that grandparents view the museum as a collaborative experience. They interact and talk with their grandchildren the most when surrounded by real objects. We also found that grandparents think of the web as a solo learning experience, and therefore, did not collaborate as much with their grandchildren in that setting.
We explored how children, families, and the general public think about and learn about intelligent technologies. This research spanned a number of formal and informal venues, including museums, science centers, on-line communities, and intensive educational experiences like robot summer camp.
As our society embraces technology in a variety of domains, we believed it was time to start asking new questions about how children and families make sense of smart technologies, and how informal learning venues can support and facilitate meaningful experiences with this type of technology. In collaboration with our colleagues from the Mobile Robot Programming Lab at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, we investigated how families use the Personal Exploration Rover museum exhibit to discuss some difficult concepts like robotic autonomy. We also looked at intensive educational experiences, like robot summer camp, in order to determine what effect this type of experience can have on children's learning and identification with technology.
We continue to investigate how people learn about robots in informal and formal educational settings. More recently, we worked with our colleagues at the Robotics Institute to understand the impact of programs like TeRK, which provides users with the tools to develop their own robots using off-the-shelf parts. We suspect that these types of programs will make robotics accessible to a larger segment of the population. Our current research investigates how increasing access can impact girls' interest in robotics.
In cooperation with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we conducted a study that investigated how an island of expertise around dinosaurs would influence family learning behaviors in Dinosaur Hall. Through video-taped observations, parent surveys, and child interviews, we explored the ways that children's dinosaur knowledge shaped parent-child conversations and interactions in Dinosaur Hall. This study investigated how child knowledge influenced the content of talk, information mediation, and learning role negotiation the occurred between parents and children.
We suggest that in collaboration with parents, caregivers, family, and friends, children can develop an island of expertise — a collection of knowledge, interest, and activity around a specific topic (Crowley & Jacobs, 2002). For children who are actively building an island of expertise around a topic like dinosaurs, family support is critical to the development of information processing skills that can help them to maintain and foster their interest. The islands of expertise framework is a developmental account which explores children's individual interests and focused pursuit of these topics and investigates how these interests might transition into expertise.
When developing an island of expertise around dinosaurs, young children in cooperation with parents and caregivers actively collect information and experiences that expand their knowledge about dinosaurs through reading dinosaur themed books, suggesting dinosaur DVDs or TV programs, using the Internet to track recent discoveries and visiting museums and active excavation sites. The islands of expertise theory, suggests that family conversations provide a mechanism for children and parents to collect and integrate facts into more sophisticated conceptual understanding.
UPCLOSE explored the notion of "islands of expertise" by conducting interviews on a large scale of two different categories of participants: undergraduates reflecting on their childhood islands and parents of children between the ages of 4 and 14 reflecting on the islands of their children.
We began our undergraduate interviews, recruiting 100 participants from the University of Pittsburgh's undergraduates. These interviews lasted approximately 20 minutes and encouraged undergraduates to describe an intense interest they had as a child, revealing how this interest evolved throughout their childhood.
After gaining insight into the "islands" of undergraduates reflecting on their childhood, we then turned to parents of children ages 4-14. For this phase of the project, we hoped to extend beyond the Pittsburgh area into a national recruitment of parent participants. These interviews were similar to the undergraduate interviews except that parents were discussing the islands of their children, perhaps islands that still exist today.
Through this extensive interview study, we hoped to hear the multitude of island stories that exist and begin to gain a better understanding into the notion of "islands of expertise."
The Museum Learning Collaborative (MLC), funded by a consortium of public agencies under the direction of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, has been established to further theoretically driven research on learning in museums. This nationwide project includes a core set of researchers and museums working together to create a community of scholars dedicated to developing a common research agenda that benefits from the combined expertise of these two constituencies.
In support of this agenda, the MLC assembled a comprehensive annotated literature database — an invaluable resource for museum professionals, museum studies students, and others interested in informal learning. In addition, the MLC compiled a list of university course syllabi that deal with informal learning and learning in museums. The ultimate goal was to bring together academic and museum researchers so they could proceed with a common research focus, one that builds from two substantial bodies of knowledge — on learning and on museums — to create a clearer understanding of how learning occurs in museum environments.
The structure of their web site reflected the goals of the Collaborative. In addition to specifying in detail the MLC philosophy and purpose, the site provided information about the collaborating researchers and collaborating museums, an online copy of the annotated literature database, and downloadable research reports and designs. The news and related links page disseminated current information about the project's activities and provided web links to related sites on the Internet.
We were interested in how parents and children discuss challenging content during a museum visit. For this study, challenging content was defined as talk about death and dying, human remains, ritual sacrifices, and forensics. This study was conducted at the Mysterious Bog People exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the fall of 2005.
One of our research assistants conducted this research as a senior honors thesis. Prior research on parent-child learning in museums showed that parents often use conversation to facilitate how children explore exhibits. This observational study investigated the content and discourse of parent-child conversations about challenging content during a museum visit. This study surveyed 34 families and recorded the parent-child interactions of those families.
Parents who reported having low levels of comfort with the content presented in the exhibit were found to discuss this content with their children less and to offer fewer explanations and descriptions about this content to their children. These findings suggest that how comfortable a parent is with the content of an exhibit will influence how they engage with their children at that exhibit and how they rate the exhibit overall. Analysis of the data also revealed significant gender differences, such as that parents were three times as likely to offer explanations about challenging content to girls as they were to boys.
Robot 250 combined elements of an after-school program and environmental activism projects with a citywide event for the robotic expression of art, history, and culture. To mark Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary in 2008, regional leadership organized a handful of "250" projects to build and celebrate civic identity. Robot 250 was a project where youth and community groups invented and displayed 250 robots around the city. The installations were creative expressions centering on three themes: "The Environment," "Neighborhood and Play," "History and Heritage" — that cross–cut all of Pittsburgh's many distinct neighborhoods and communities. Hundreds of children and adults participated, with most the robots being produced by workshops following our Robot Diaries model or through community open studios following the Neighborhood Nets model. There was also a juried show of robotic art produced by professional artists as well as installations highlighting cutting edge robots from industry and academics. The two–week display of the robots took place in the Summer of 2008 at museums and other locations around town and combined messages about art, history, culture, and robotics for thousands of visitors. With primary funding from the Heinz Endowments and Grable Foundation (and participation from a number of other industry and private foundations), Robot 250 workshops and open studios launched in June 2007 and will continue through June 2008.
Middle school girls are avid technology users — they are fluent with computers, cell-phones, iPods, etc. The Robot Diaries project seeked to help girls move from technology consumers to creative technology users. Along with our collaborators at the Mobile Robot Programming Lab at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, we ran a series of creative technology workshops with middle school girls in the Pittsburgh area. In designing and running these workshops, we wanted to answer two questions: How can we design informal learning experiences that encourage creative uses of technology, and how can we measure change in children's creativity with technology?
In order to address the first question, we spent a few months engaged in participatory design activities with middle school girls. The goal of these activities was to understand the types of technology experiences middle school girls would find engaging, so that we may build our curriculum around compelling technology activities.
In order to address the second question, we engaged ourselves in a multi-disciplinary dialogue, pulling together resources from the creativity, engineering, education, and cognitive psychology literatures to develop measurement guidelines for the concept of 'creativity with technology.'
The Andy Warhol Museum developed a resource site for educators in 2005-2006. During the development phases of The Warhol: Resources & Lessons website, UPCLOSE conducted a series of participant studies to evaluate the emerging website. The findings were shared with The Andy Warhol Museum's Education Department to improve the content, navigation, and usability of the site as it was being developed.
The goal of the site was to disseminate curricula developed by The Andy Warhol Museum's Education Department around the life and artistic practice of Andy Warhol. Both parties aimed to help make the site functional, appealing, and appropriate for the target audiences of teachers, museum educators and students and their parents.
To increase the effectiveness of the site, we conducted three phases of evaluation of the website through its many changes. Phase I included an interactive design evaluation by UPCLOSE researchers and in-depth user evaluations in October 2005. Phase II began after a major redesign based on our earlier study. We conducted user evaluations with a larger audience and facilitated a focus group in February 2006 for the stakeholders of The Warhol Museum. After additional design changes and the addition of further content, Phase III began in June 2006 as we developed and conducted an online survey. The survey concluded in August 2006, and UPCLOSE conducted a final design evaluation the Warhol: Resources & Lessons site at that time.