scholarly journals A Successful Educational Collaboration between Scientists and Educators: Microscopic Explorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lincoln Bergman ◽  
Caroline Schooley

The teacher's guide, Microscopic Explorations: A GEMS Festival Guide ( Brady and Willard, 1998 ), is the result of a partnership between Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS), a program of the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), the public science and curriculum development center of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Microscopy Society of America (MSA). Microscopic Exploration supports the MSA's low-cost national outreach program and, also, reaches a very large educational community as part of the GEMS series. Some of the lessons learned through the extremely successful MSA/LHS collaboration are summarized here in hopes that they may be instructive to other scientists and educators as they launch their own partnerships and collaborations.

2011 ◽  
Vol 1320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ainissa G. Ramirez

AbstractThe National Science Foundation (NSF) evaluates grant applications based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impact. The broader impact criterion (BIC), or the science outreach criterion, is intended to connect science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) research to the general public, and has grown in its relevance for successful grants. A method to increase the competitiveness of a grant application and, in turn, the quality of science outreach programs is to suggest successful science outreach models for connecting scientists to the public. Science Saturdays is a fun science lecture series for the general public that is a simple, scalable, and transferable model. Its main mission is to introduce participants to excellent communicators of science and to shatter stereotypes about those who do science. It aims to inspire and motivate children as they traverse the STEM pipeline by emphasizing that science is fun. This paper discusses the elements needed to create this outreach program and the lessons learned from its development.


2021 ◽  
pp. 10.1212/CPJ.0000000000001081
Author(s):  
Noriko Anderson ◽  
S Andrew Josephson ◽  
Nicole Rosendale

AbstractThe University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Neurology Department incorporated a formal diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum into the residency education in 2015. During that time, we have learned a number of lessons that can be useful to other institutions planning similar initiatives including: 1) training should be led by a multidisciplinary team with experienced educators; 2) sustainability of the curriculum requires broad departmental buy-in from leadership to junior faculty to the residents themselves; 3) the curriculum needs to balance training on fundamental topics with flexibility to change in response to current events and the needs of the community; and 4) the sessions need to be practical.


Author(s):  
Vicente Borja ◽  
Alejandro Ramírez-Reivich ◽  
Marcelo López-Parra ◽  
Arturo Treviño Arizmendi ◽  
Luis F. Equihua Zamora

A team of faculty members from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has coordinated multidisciplinary courses in collaboration with universities from other countries. The team, who is composed by faculty from the School of Engineering and the School of Architecture, coordinates with pairs of Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Technical University of Munich; to teach three particular design courses. All three courses are related to product innovation but they have different emphasis depending on the collaborating partner. The focal points of each of the three courses are: (1) innovation, (2) user centered design and sustainability and (3) transport in megacities of the future. Engineering and industrial design students are involved in the courses. They are organized in teams that include participants from the two collaborating universities. During the courses teams carry out projects working mostly at a distance; they use different means of communication and information sharing and also pay reciprocal visits between the universities involved in the collaboration. This paper describes each of the three courses highlighting their particular characteristics. The outcomes and results of the courses and specific projects are commented. In the end of the paper lessons learned are discussed and final remarks are presented.


2018 ◽  
Vol 99 (12) ◽  
pp. 2529-2538
Author(s):  
Spencer A. Hill ◽  
Juan M. Lora ◽  
Norris Khoo ◽  
Sean P. Faulk ◽  
Jonathan M. Aurnou

AbstractDemonstrations using rotating tanks of fluid can help demystify otherwise counterintuitive behaviors of atmospheric, oceanic, and planetary interior fluid motions. But the expense and complicated assembly of existing rotating table platforms limit their appeal for many schools, especially those below the university level. Here, we introduce Do-It-Yourself Dynamics (DIYnamics), a project developing extremely low-cost rotating tank platforms and accompanying teaching materials. The devices can be assembled in a few minutes from household items, all available for purchase online. Ordering, assembly, and operation instructions are available on the DIYnamics website. Videos using these and other rotating tables to teach specific concepts such as baroclinic instability are available on the DIYnamics YouTube channel—including some in Spanish. The devices, lesson plans, and demonstrations have been successfully piloted at multiple middle schools, in a university course, and at public science outreach events. These uses to date convince us of the DIYnamics materials’ pedagogical value for instructors from well-versed university professors to K–12 science teachers with little background in fluid dynamics.


SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401985742
Author(s):  
Alison Chopel ◽  
R. Eugene Lee ◽  
Elizabeth Ortiz-Matute ◽  
Namiyé Peoples ◽  
Kim Homer Vagadori ◽  
...  

The California Adolescent Health Collaborative, a project of the Public Health Institute, in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education jointly led a community-based participatory research (CBPR) study engaging youth coresearchers to fill the critical gap in knowledge about youth’s perceptions of electronic cigarette products and how they are marketed toward young people in Oakland. Youth coresearchers who were trained as journalists partnered with the adult investigators to explore the e-cigarette topic from their perspective, embedded in the context of their own experiences and those of others in their communities. The goal of this exploratory CBPR study was to improve understanding of how and why youth (ages: 14-24 years) in Oakland are adopting (or resisting) e-cigarettes, how youth respond to increasing availability of e-cigarettes in their communities, and how they perceive communications about e-cigarettes (e.g., advertising) and in turn communicate about the products to each other.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (03) ◽  
pp. 1950028
Author(s):  
SUNEEL KUNAMANENI

Low-cost innovation is increasingly becoming the focus of attention of both firms and policy makers in emerging and transition countries. Previous research has elaborated on the ‘market-based’ view of low-cost innovations captured under various terminologies such as ‘frugal’, ‘good-enough’, ‘resource-constrained’, etc. This study, however, demonstrates that low-cost innovation capabilities are profoundly influenced by the structuring of institutions, particularly the public-science system. The analysis in this paper is structured around innovation in rechargeable batteries in China and point-of-use water purification in India, drawing upon strategies at the Chinese firm BYD and Indian firm Tata, respectively. Both the cases illustrate that diffusion-oriented policies and weak university–industry links played a critical role in firms low-cost ‘incremental’ innovations. However, as regards ‘pre-competitive’ research conducted in the public-science system, with the potential for better performing ‘radical’ technologies at lower costs, the current structure of institutions and firms strategies does not encourage firms to appropriate value from them into innovative output. This has important implications for both firms and policy makers in scaling-up low-cost radical innovations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Laura Uglean Jackson ◽  
Matthew McKinley

In October 2014, the University of California Irvine (UCI) Special Collections and Archives acquired a born digital collection of 2.5 terabytes – the largest born digital collection acquired by the department to date. This case study describes the challenges we encountered when applying existing archival procedures to appraise, store, and provide access to a large born digital collection. It discusses solutions when they could be found and ideas for solutions when they could not, lessons learned from the experience, and the impact on born-digital policy and procedure at UCI Libraries. Working with a team of archivists, librarians, IT, and California Digital Library (CDL) staff, we discovered issues and determined solutions that will guide our procedures for future acquisitions of large and unwieldy born digital collections. 


Author(s):  
James Livesey

This chapter explores how the project of improvement, which extended far beyond the elites who operated in the university and the scientific society, disseminated new standards of judgment and rationality. In recent years, historians have found new ways to understand the popular Enlightenment, that curious zone between authoritative knowledge and diverse opinion. All of those routes are useful in approaching the popular experience in the Languedoc. The hypothesis of the “public sphere” inspired historians to rediscover the public use of reason by theatre audiences, newspaper readerships, and crowds at exhibitions without the prominent writers who were important sources of authoritative ideas. The chapter also explains how progress could be marketed in the form of medicines, clothes, or foods. Consumption was a practice that went far beyond objects; there was a sphere of public science, and a market for scientific lectures and displays, in eighteenth-century Paris and beyond.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Harris ◽  
William Heikoop ◽  
Allison Van Beek ◽  
James S. Wallace

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow anyone in the public to learn from professors at universities across the world. An internet connection is the only requirement to participate in a MOOC. In engineering, the majority of MOOCs are targeted at self-learners, and consequently most courses are based on introductory undergraduate courses. The University of Toronto offered its first advanced engineering MOOC entitled, “Wind, Waves & Tides” based on a mixed fourth-year undergraduate and graduate level course. A total of 11,723 students registered in the course, and 617 students completed the course in its entirety. The following paper describes the experience of teaching a niche interest MOOC and the lessons learned throughout the endeavour.


2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 18-19
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Taatjes ◽  
Janet Schwarz

Project MICRO (Microscopy in Curriculum - Research Outreach) is an initiative by the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) to connect scientists with middle school teachers in an effort to introduce young students to the scientific method. Through a collaboration with the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, a teacher's manual was produced as part of the LHS GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) series. This manual, entitled “Microscopic Explorations”, can be used by scientists and middle school teachers alike to prepare a Project MICRO “Festival” to be presented in the classroom. Detailed information concerning Project MICRO in general, and the Microscopic Explorations manual can be obtained from the Project MICRO web page from MSA (http://www.msa.microscopy.com/ProjectMicro/PMHomePage.html).


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