Science museum staff face a constructivist dilemma as they design their public spaces: the exhibits should facilitate science learning, yet they also need to support a diverse visiting public in making their own personal choices about where to attend, what to do, and how to interpret their interactions. To be effective as teaching tools, exhibits need to be highly intrinsically motivating at every step of an interaction in order to sustain involvement by an audience who views their visit primarily as a leisure activity. Given these challenges, it is vital to support the design process with a strong program of research and evaluation. I give a personal perspective on one institution's research and evaluation work over the last decade, focusing on four areas: immediate apprehendability, physical interactivity, conceptual coherence, and diversity of learners. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed88(Suppl. 1):S17–S33, 2004

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Designs for Learning: Studying Science Museum Exhibits that Do More than Entertain.

Historically, most of the focus of science education has been on pre-college and college level schooling. Although some of the public's interest and knowledge about science is unquestionably shaped by compulsory schooling, given that the average adult spends only a fraction of their life participating in some kind of formal schooling, we argue that the contribution of school-based science learning to the long-term public understanding of science is limited, particularly for the majority of Americans who do not go on to post-secondary schooling. This article shows that the majority of the public constructs much of its understanding of science over the course of their lives, gathering information from many places and contexts, and for a diversity of reasons. A random telephone survey of Los Angeles, California residents found that nearly half (43 percent) of the public's self-reported science understanding derives from leisure time, free-choice learning; science understanding was primarily acquired for reas...

Investigating public science interest and understanding: evidence for the importance of free-choice learning

While theoretical work and empirical research have examined science policy-informing “dialogue events,” dialogue events that do not seek to inform public policy are under-theorized and under-researched, even though they are common and growing in popularity in the UK. We describe how, from a critical perspective, it may initially appear that such events cannot be justified without returning to the deficit model. But with this paper, we seek to open up a discussion about these non policy-informing events by arguing that there are in fact further ways to understand and frame them. We deliberately draw on different literatures and seek to make use of practitioner expertise within our discussion, in order to display several perspectives on the value of non-policy dialogue on science as sites of symmetrical individual or small-scale learning —rather than institutional learning—through social processes .

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Discussing dialogue: perspectives on the value of science dialogue events that do not inform policy:

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-0638981. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions, expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Center for Advance-ment of Informal Science Education.

Many Experts, Many Audiences: Public Engagement with Science and Informal Science Education

Technology trends have enabled deployment of low-cost sensor-based systems, but designing customized sensor-based systems to carry out specific tasks still requires costly engineering by experts. We briefly summarize eBlocks, a technology enabling nonexperts to quickly construct basic customized sensor-based systems, without requiring electronics or knowledge of programming languages. We describe experiments illustrating successful construction of Boolean sensor-based systems by novice users, focusing on intuitive logic and state block design. Additionally, we present preliminary experiments demonstrating usability of integer-based blocks and introduce a programmable block and the corresponding configuration methodology intended for nonexpert users.

Enabling nonexpert construction of basic sensor-based systems

Over the past decade in the UK, communities of scientists, governmental bodies, and informal learning organizations have increasingly promoted public engagement with science. One of the most visible features of these efforts within museums is the staging of adult-focused, face-to-face forums-commonly called dialogue events-that bring scientific and technical experts, social scientists, and policymakers into discussion with members of the public about contemporary science-based issues. This article clarifies the difference between non-policy-informing dialogue events and other interactions in museums. It then describes how one institution, the Science Museum's Dana Centre, London, has conceptualised, implemented, and refined its understanding of dialogue events based on iterative processes of theory-building, practice, and evaluation. It concludes by outlining future directions for promoting a broader culture of engagement through dialogue related to science and society.

Learning to Generate Dialogue: Theory, Practice, and Evaluation

Everything We Currently Know about Making Visitor-Friendly Mechanical Interactive Exhibits.

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Learning to Generate Dialogue: Theory, Practice, and Evaluation

Everything We Currently Know about Making Visitor-Friendly Mechanical Interactive Exhibits.