Uncategorized « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Oregon State University

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.”

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.

Today, Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS) hosted the Salmon Bowl, our regional competition within the National Ocean Sciences Bowl. Some fellow grad students and I had the opportunity to try out a free-choice learning activity with the participants as part of a class project.

I really enjoyed seeing high school students engaged with ocean sciences. Many conservation issues don’t have easy answers. It’s nice to know the next generation of of scientists, voters, educators and citizens in general includes people who are eager to learn and willing to listen to others.

In the Lab, we’re still scrambling to get the website finished up. We’ve had a lot of great help (technical and emotional) from our colleagues on campus. Thanks, everybody. It’s getting there.

The FCL Lab website currently tops our list of priorities.

We’ve been struggling with it for months now, and our biggest obstacles have been the odd affordances and constraints of Drupal. Drupal is the content management system used by Oregon State University. It’s open-source and very adaptable.

These are good things.

It’s also user-hostile and often intolerably restrictive for users without certain administrative privileges.

These are bad things.

Very bad things.

It’s sort of like being handed an array of organic compounds and told to create a rhinoceros. Of course, you have to assemble your rhinoceros one cell at a time, creating each cell individually, organelle by organelle. You can’t just make a skin cell, copy it, then paste it all over the rhino. You see, this lack of a basic function allows you to make a rhino with all kinds of crazy skin, so it’s actually a “feature.” Aren’t you grateful?

Oh, and you can’t bond hydrogen to carbon yourself because your version of nature does not include that functionality. There’s an active community of creator deities out there who have found various workarounds, but these all require a level of sanctioned omnipotence that the universe has withheld from you as a matter of policy. You can finish at least the brain by the end of the week, right? After all, it’s just one thing!

Perhaps Drupal’s most beautiful moment so far came toward the beginning of our development process. We wanted to find out how to activate and work with modules, so we tried to consult the help documentation. Instead of the help page, we were greeted with a message telling us to install the “help” module, with no further explanation.

Fantastic.

Jasper Visser wrote up this brief list of five advantages Pinterest offers for audience engagement.

“Pinterest is the perfect platform for culture, if you ask me. It’s the platform most suited to give meaning to our mission statements and values.”

Pinterest is the “it” social medium right now. Do you think it will prove to be a lasting and effective method of talking to and with audiences?

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Reporting live from the Exploratorium

Michelle’s at the Exploratorium

What are you all doing over there?

Salmon Bowl

Oh, the Drupality!

“5 things you could do with Pinterest” (From The Museum of the Future)

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