Laura was very excited to receive her new iPad today. She will use the iPad in her research to conduct surveys and observations (in conjunction with head-mounted camcorders). More on this to come.
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There is nothing like celebrating Pi Day at the Exploratorium! The scientists’ time on the floor was cut a little short today due to Pi Day festivities, but it was fun taking it all in. The field trip explainers, who spend a lot of time working directly with the scientists on this project, put on an amazing performance of an original song, which I recorded for your viewing pleasure. Sitting in our afternoon meetings we could hear the celebration continue. There was a parade of the digits of pi that worked its way through the museum. And let’s not forget actual pie (I had a piece of strawberry pie and chicken & spinach quiche).
This was a special Pi Day celebration for the Exploratorium. A physicist at the Exploratorium founded Pi Day and it is the last year the museum will celebrate Pi Day at the Palace of Fine Arts (the museum moves to Pier 15 in 2013). More information and Pi Day activities can be found at http://www.exploratorium.edu/pi/index.html.
I need to give a shout out to the band, Buffon’s Needle, in the video.
Adam Green, keyboards
Chas Thomsen, bass
Lok Chan, guitar
Ryan Juan, drums
Khamara Pettus, lead vocals
Remaining field trip explainers, back-up vocals
And sorry for the late post, using the iPad along with editing and uploading videos is a learning experience!
It seems like I never left Corvallis. It’s my first full day in San Francisco and the skies are grey and it’s raining! Thankfully, I am staying inside at the Exploratorium with two visiting NOAA scientists who study weather. The scientist-in-residence program at the Exploratorium brings NOAA scientists to the museum floor to interact with museum staff and visitors. My role is to evaluate those interactions.
I, and the scientists, will be here for about two weeks and during that time I will post what is happening with the project. The scientist-in-residence project is funded by a NOAA Environmental Literacy grant and the iPad is written in to the grant as a mediating tool. Last year it was a struggle to incorporate the iPad, as it needs to be used with the right information at the right time and in the right space. The project team has learned from experiences during the first year and is trying out different ways of using the iPad this year.
Over the next two weeks I will use the iPad for data collection, mainly observations and surveys. I am testing how different iPad survey apps operate and if they are user friendly for both the visitor and the researcher. More on that later…
Now, to the fun part! Dave Rust, Sean Waugh and Susan Cobb are from NOAA’s National Severe Storm Lab and are the current group in residence. This means we get to talk lightning, tornados, and hail, all of which provoke strong memories of growing up in Central Illinois!
Unfortunately, Dave was only here last week. Sean drove the mobile mesonet from Oklahoma to San Francisco and it is currently parked on the museum floor. Sean is a storm chaser and both he and Susan worked on the Vortex project. They have a lot of stories to share with the explainers and visitors, along with captivating pictures, and ideas for activities. We will see how the residency shapes up over the next two weeks.
Michelle will be posting this week from the Exploratorium. She’s currently working with NOAA scientists and some of our iPad apps. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s something to keep you occupied. An AI called “Angelina,” developed as part of Michael Cook‘s Ph.D. project at Imperial College, generates (almost) entire games procedurally. From the New Scientist piece:
“Angelina can’t yet build an entire game by itself as Cook must add in the graphics and sound effects, but even so the games can easily match the quality of some Facebook or smartphone games, with little human input. ‘In theory there is nothing to stop an artist sitting down with Angelina, creating a game every 12 hours and feeding that into the Apple App Store,’ says Cook.”
The capacity of games to teach is a research interest of mine, and I think the most interesting thing about Angelina is its ability to run through its own creations to determine (presumably using human-defined parameters) how engaging they are. It shows in the New Scientist-commissioned “Space Station Invaders” demo game, which is a retro platformer with some nice simple jumping challenges. The player character’s immortality is a welcome inclusion, as the aggressive procedurally-generated enemy behaviors give new meaning to that classic gamer complaint: “The computer cheats.”
Harrison used an interesting choice of phrase in his last post: “time-tested.” I was just thinking as I watched the video they produced, including Bill’s dissection, that I don’t know what we’ve done to rigorously evaluate our live programming at Hatfield. But it is just this sort of “time-tested” program that our research initiatives are truly trying to sort out and put to the test. Time has proven its popularity, data is necessary to prove its worth as a learning tool. A very quick survey of the research literature doesn’t turn up much, though some science theater programming was the subject of older studies. Live tours are another related program that could be ripe for investigation.
We all know, as humans who recognize emotions in others, how much visitors enjoy these sorts of programs and science shows of all types. However, we don’t always apply standards to our observations, such as measuring specific variables to answer specific questions. We have a general sense of “positive affect” in our visitors, but we don’t have any data in the form of examples of quotes or interviews with visitors to back up our thoughts. Yet.
A good example of another need for this was in a recent dissertation defense here at OSU. Nancy Staus’ research looked at learning from a live program, and she interviewed visitors after watching a program at a science center. She found, however, that the presenter of the program had a lot of influence on the learning simply by the way they presented the program: visitors recalled more topics and more facts about each topic when the presentation was more interactive than scripted. She wasn’t initially interested in differences of this sort, but because she’d collected this sort of data on the presentations, she was able to locate a probable cause for a discrepancy she noted. So while this wasn’t the focus of her research (she was actually interested in the role of emotion in mediating learning), it pointed to the need for data to not only back up claims, but also to lead to explanations for surprising results and open areas for further study.
That’s what we’re working for: that rigorously examining these and all sorts of other learning opportunities becomes an integral part of the “time-honored tradition.”
Mark and I did some guerrilla filmmaking this morning. Despite some hiccups and an uncooperative Sun, we got some good footage. As I type this, Mark is preparing these and other videos for the Sea Grant all-hands meeting tomorrow and Friday.
Communicating what we do is a big part of what we do. This is ethically necessary for human-subjects research (see Katie’s post from Monday), and it’s also a great way to teach science as a process. It’s a somewhat recursive approach that can be, oddly enough, difficult to communicate. I like to think we do a decent job of it.
I think the key point, as always, is that we’re all in this together. Visitors, researchers, students and educators each have a role to play in this thing we call “Science.” Researchers can learn about natural phenomena from the observations of the general public, while the general public can learn about research and natural phenomena from our Visitor Center exhibits and outreach products. It’s a two-way street—nay, a busy four-way, multi-lane intersection—and our job is to facilitate the flow of information in any direction.
Much of what we do is familiar and time-tested—Bill, resplendent in his bloodstained white lab coat, holding aloft the entrails of a found shark before a crowd of excited children. Such childhood experiences with classic museum interpretation are what drew many of us into this field.
Hopefully, the new strategies and technologies we’re in the process of introducing will come to be equally accepted and enjoyed by visitors.