Changing the Rules?

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For those of you just joining us, I’m developing a game called Deme for my master’s project. It’s a tactical game that models an ecosystem, and it’s meant primarily for adults. I’m studying how people understand the game’s mechanics in relation to the real world, in an effort to better understand games as learning and meaning-making tools.

I stumbled across Roll20, quite by accident, while reading the PA Report. What I like about Roll20 is the fact that your table session can be shared as a link (apparently—I haven’t started digging yet as I only found out about it a few hours ago). Also, each token can be assigned a hit counter. Damage tracking is something of a hassle in Deme’s current incarnation.

I’ll have more to report after I play around with this for a while. Moving the game from one incarnation and environment to another has forced me to think of it as a system, rather than a product. I want Deme to be portable, and a robust system can be used with just about any tabletop, real or virtual. For an example of a game system, see Wizards of the Coast’s d20 System. The d20 System happens to be a handy model for quantizing events and behaviors—handy enough to inform the data collection framework for our observation systems in the Visitor Center.

Of course, Deme cannot be run single-player as a tabletop game. That’s a double-edged sword. A tabletop game (even a virtual one) is an immediate social experience. A single-player game is a social experience too, but it’s an asynchronous interaction between the developer(s) and the player. I rather like the tabletop approach because each species has a literal voice. The unearthly torrent of resulting qualitative data may be tough to sort out, but I think that’s a good problem to have so long as I know what I’m looking for.

At this phase, the tabletop version is still officially—as much as I can make something official—just a pilot product. I don’t know if it will become something more, but I feel like it deserves a shot.

Wordle You Say? Or, how to use word clouds to look at your data

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I have been shuffling through data from the Exploratorium’s scientist-in-residence (SIR) project and I started thinking about what data (and the kinds of ways data) can or should be shared on a blog.  For now, I am going to share a few word clouds of raw data.  These do not illustrate full sentences nor can you tell which participant said what.

Each of these word clouds was based off of a survey question that I wrote and administered.

Visitors to the exhibition space were asked, upon leaving, “What would you tell a friend this space was about?”  The word cloud below contains data from the March residency, which focused on severe storm science (with scientists from NOAA’s National Severe Storm Lab).

 

The Exploratorium Explainers were an integral part of this project.  At the end of the second year I asked all of the Explainers, the Lead Explainers, and the Explainer managers to voluntarily complete the online survey.

Here is how Explainer managers responded to “Describe the impacts of this project on the scientists.”

 

While the Explainer survey was quite long and there is a lot of rich data there, I want to focus on their thoughts about the iPad.  The iPad was incorporated into the exhibition space as a mediating tool (as specified in the grant proposal).  I asked the Explainers “Where and how do you think the iPad was incorporated throughout the project?”  Their response…

 

 

So, what can we gain from word clouds?  It is certainly one way to look at raw data.  Thoughts?

 

Theoretically Speaking …

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… is what we’ll be doing starting this fall as a group of advisees of Dr. Rowe. As a couple of us near defense time (we hope), it seemed a good time to start a regular discussion of the theories and frameworks most pertinent to what we all do. There are a lot of them; as much as we share interest in science education, we have a lot of different ideas about how to do it for the array of audiences and venues we’re concerned with as well. So expect more along those lines coming up in the blog.

For now, here’s a video of Dr. Rowe introducing his own framework, which of course informs the entire lab agenda:

It WAS the network!

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The network did turn out to be the cause of most of our camera skipping. We had all 25+ cameras running on MJPEG, which was driving our network usage through the roof at almost 10MB/sec per camera on a 100MB pipe. We did have to have the Convergint tech come out to help figure it out, and re-configure a few things, with some small hints.

First, we switched some of the cameras to H.264 when we were ok with a slightly less crisp picture, like our establishment shots to follow how people move from exhibit to exhibit. This drops the network usage to less than 1MB/sec per camera, though it does drive the CPU usage up a bit. That’s a fair tradeoff because our computers are dedicated to this video processing.

We also set up user accounts on the slave server as well as the master, which allowed us to spread the cameras across the two to distribute usage, and are working with our IT folks to bridge the servers to spread the load amongst the four that we have, so that even if we are driving nearly the full network usage, we are doing it on four servers instead of one. Finally, we put the live video on a different drive, also freeing up processing power.

Just a few tips and tweaks seem to have given us much smoother playback. Now to get more IP addresses from campus to spread the network load even further as we think ahead to more cameras.

An Interesting Result

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I’ve wrapped up my work with the NEES REU program, and as my final assignment I wrote a report on the Folklife Festival evaluation. I didn’t have time to do an in depth analysis, but I did enough to report that the activity was overwhelmingly fun, and that people felt like it was worth their time (despite the incredible heat). Based on anecdotal evidence from previous activities with the mini-flume, we weren’t exactly surprised by these results, but confirmation is always nice.

What was surprising showed up in the demographic information. We had the expected breakdown of men and women, race/ethnicity, and even age. But when I tallied highest education level, half of the participants reported having at least a master’s degree. Now I have questions about how and why we got this interesting demographic breakdown. Is the activity more appealing to this demographic? Was the Festival what was more appealing and we just caught the demographic?

Or was there something in my recruitment method that would have resulted in this odd sampling?

Folklife only counted visitors so I don’t have access to the demographics of the larger population, so for now I have no way of answering these questions, but I will keep it in mind as I do more in depth analysis on the Folklife data.

Can you do science on a desert island?

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My original thesis question was: Does participating in a citizen science program give volunteers a greater understanding of the Nature of Science?  Searching the current literature, I realized most authors assumed that understanding the nature and process of science is actually useful to non-scientists.  Considering the lack of empirical data to support this assumption, it was not something I was willing to adopt uncritically.  Instead, I began “unpacking the lines” leading up to my original question, untangling the messy web all the way back to fundamental questions around science and science education.   What is the value of science?  What is the ultimate goal of science education?  Asking these questions, it’s hard not to feel like Derek Zoolander staring into a puddle (“Who am I?”), but I think they are essential for every scientist and science educator to consider.  Many of the questions I posed are ultimately unknowable, at least by me, but the process of asking them, writing about them, and discussing them with peers, professors, family, and friends has been what I consider the most valuable part of my education.

Below are several questions I’m exploring in developing the theoretical framework for my thesis.

Science Literacy

  • What is the ultimate goal of science education? What learning outcomes best support that goal?
  • As an educator, does having a clear idea of how I expect people to actually use scientific knowledge in daily life change how I frame the learning experience?
  • What is the relationship between scientific literacy and participating in scientific research?

Nature of Science (NOS)

  • When is it important for non-scientists to understand how science works as a discipline, as opposed to understanding how a particular natural phenomenon works?
  • Is inquiry-based or experiential education simply an effective and engaging approach to science education, or does it give students a deeper understanding of the nature and process of science? If students do learn more about how science works, how will they use that knowledge in the future?  How important is explicit NOS instruction?

Citizen Science (CS)

  • How do participant motivations and outcomes of CS programs differ from other informal science ed programs?  From project- and inquiry-based learning, or experiential education?
  • What science literacy goals are supported by the different models of CS projects?

Science and Democracy

  • What science knowledge do people need in order to function in a modern democratic society?  Are there any aspects of science literacy that all groups of people should know, regardless of who they are, where they live, and what their interests are?
  • What does it mean to be an “informed citizen”?

Perspectives on “doing science” and “definition of science”

  • What are all the definitions of science under which different groups of people operate?  What is the minimum threshold of engagement for someone to be “doing science”?
  • What learning outcomes are supported by “doing science”?  Why do many educators prefer that their students “do science” instead of watch a demonstration?

History of Science, Professionalization of Science, and the Novice / Expert demarcation

  • Can you do science unintentionally?  Who do you think was the first scientist?  Can you do science on a desert island?
  • At what point of being involved in science-related activities do non-experts begin to feel they are “doing science”?  What’s the difference between doing science, doing something scientifically, and doing something expertly?
  • How does the history of science and the professionalization of science over the past couple centuries influence our current definition of science?

Normative Science

  • If I was working as a scientist, what would I want my relationship with advocacy to be?  If I was working as an educator, what would I want my relationship with advocacy to be?
  • What are the special roles in society that scientists and educators have?  Are there rules each should follow in communicating science?
  • Do scientists or educators ever receive explicit instruction about how to handle their civic responsibilities as professionals?  What is lost by not asking yourself: How do my underlying values get incorporated into my science? Into how I communicate science?