Tag Archives: Exploratorium

Coming to the breaking point

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And I don’t just mean Thanksgiving! Lately, I’ve run across an exhibit, a discussion, and now an article on things wearing down and breaking, so I figured that meant it was time for a blog post.

It started with my visit to the Exploratorium, who find that stuff breaks, sometimes unexpectedly. Master tinkerers and builders that they are, they made it into an exhibit of worn, bent or flat-out broken parts of their exhibits. It may take hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of uses, but when your visitorship is near a million per year, it doesn’t take that many days to find micro-changes suddenly visible as macro changes.

 

Then Laura suggested that we keep track of all the equipment we’ve been buying in case of, you guessed it, breaking (or other loss). So we’ve started an inventory that not only will serve as a nice record for the project of all the bits and bobs we’ve had to buy (so far, over 300 feet of speaker wire for just 10 cameras), but also will help us replace them more easily should something go wrong. Which we know it will, eventually, and frankly, we’ll have a sense of how quickly it goes wrong if we keep our records well. In our water-laden touch pools and wave tanks environment, this very likely will be sooner than we hope.

Finally, John Baek’s Open and Online Lifelong Learning newspaper linked to this story from Wired magazine about the people who are deliberately trying to break things, to make the unexpected expected.

So, have a great Thanksgiving break (in the U.S.), and try not to break anything in the process.

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?

 

So much data, so little time.

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Ok, I guess I am following suit and forgot to post on Friday! I don’t have quite as good of an excuse as Katie. Instead of prepping for conferences I was recovering from a vacation.

I thought it might be nice to provide an update about the Exploratorium project, where NOAA scientists are embedded on the museum floor with the Explainers (Exploratorium front-line staff consisting of young adults). I have collected so much data for this project I am beginning to feel overwhelmed.

Here’s the data that I have collected:
– Formal Interviews with each of the four groups of scientists, both before and after their experience.
– Informal interviews with all of the scientists. These were done in the time walking back to the hotel or when grabbing lunch. Both great times to collect data!
– Interviews with the two Explainer managers plus a survey with open- and closed-ended questions at the end of year 2.
– Interviews with each of the lead Explainers, 8 total. Also, lead Explainers during year 2 completed a survey with open- and closed-ended questions.
– Pre- mid- and post- data for what Explainers think atmospheric sciences is and what atmospheric scientists do. This was not done during the first year topic of ocean sciences.
– I also provided an optional survey for all Explainers so they could share their thoughts and opinions about the project. This provided a reflection opportunity for the Explainers that were not lead Explainers during the project.
– Visitor surveys about their experience in the scientists’ installation. During year 2 these were collected in both paper form and using survey software on the iPad.
– Field notes during meetings and time on the museum floor. During year 2 the field notes were taken on the iPad using survey software.
– And lastly…personal daily reflections.

So the question is “now what?” This data provides opportunities for triangulation but where does one start? I’m spending my final month of summer trying to figure that out.

Hopefully my next blog post will showcase my progress and some findings.

Time to explore

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We are half way through the severe storms scientists’ residency at the Exploratorium and all is going well. We are testing many new ideas during this residency, some of them changes based on the evaluation from the last year. The scientists and explainers are working together at exhibits in the main thoroughfare of the museum. In the space is the storm chasing vehicle, a van de Graaff generator, the tornado exhibit, and the outdoor cart (a bike designed for explainers to ride around the Palace of Fine Arts, stop anywhere, and do an activity). Visitors of all ages are engaged within the space with some of them staying for an extended time (upwards of 20-30 minutes).

One thing the explainers are working on for this project is a floor walk. A floor walk allows explainers to lead visitors around the floor and give them a more in-depth experience with exhibits around a central topic. At the end of last week, the two lead explainers (those working with the severe storms scientists) practiced their floor walk with their fellow explainers, the scientists, and me. One exhibit that we explored more deeply was the tornado. We used tinsel to see how the air is flowing and therefore forming a tornado. We also explored how bubbles would act within the exhibit (http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmscvisitorcenter/6989941183/). I learned that the Exploratorium has a room devoted to bubbles. Yes, a closet that is filled with everything bubble related. Hmmm….