STEAM Project-Based Learning Activities at the Science Museum as an Effective Training for Future Chemistry Teachers

Non-formal learning environments, such as science museums, have a fundamental role in science education and high potentialities as ideal contexts for science teachers’ training. These aspects have been analyzed and reported in several recent works mainly focused on students’ perception of science and increased engagement towards scientific disciplines. In this work, a project-based learning methodology optimized and experimented in the frame of a pre-service chemistry teachers’ course at the University of Pisa (Italy), during the last eight years, involving in total 171 participants, is presented. This educational project has several distinctive features related to the STEAM philosophy, with a high level of multi-disciplinarity and creativity. Most of the laboratories and chemistry-centered activities were conceived, planned and carried out by the future chemistry teachers in non-formal contexts, such as science museums. A case study based on a series of non-formal laboratories designed by a group of students during their training in the academic year 2018–2019 and performed in a science museum is reported and examined in details. In this paper, all steps of the STEAM project-based learning methodology are described underlining the main learning outcomes and cognitive levels involved in each step and the relevant methodologies proposed during the training course and adopted in the project. The effectiveness of this pre-service teachers’ training methodology is finally discussed in terms of participants’ motivation and interest towards the course’s content, students’ final judgment of their training experiences and, in particular, of the STEAM project-based learning activities. From the students’ feedbacks and final assessment, the role of the non-formal context in teaching and learning chemistry and the efficacy of developing educational activities related to current and real-life chemistry-centered topics emerged as very positive aspects of the proposed approach.

Transformation of the city of Split industrial heritage into a science center

Background: Split is a city in the Mediterranean, situated on Croatia’s coastline. Split’s northern coast has a long-stand-ing industrial function and harbors the city’s first electri-cal substation, designed by modernist architect Josip Maria Kodl. Objective: The goal of this work was to envision a science center in Split’s industrial zone in Dujmovača (the northern coast of the Split peninsula), comprising a science museum with a research and congress center. The programmatic and spatial analyses of the science center’s amenities and the proposal as a whole demonstrate the potential of this forgotten space in Split and breathe new life into Kodl’s ar-chitectural heritage. Methods: The proposed solution uses a dialogical narrative between a conservation, contextual, programmatic, and theoretical approach within a strict orthogonal structure, fostering the development of alternative associations and elaboration of architectural details.Results: The proposed solution constitutes a complex of multiple interconnected and flexible elements. This al-lows different parts of the Science Center to function inde-pendently of each other. This paper provides an analysis of design steps and methods, the proposal’s advantages and limitations, and the way the repurposing of industrial heri-tage was approached. Conclusion: The position of the Science Center in Dujmovača would provide one of the first impressions when entering Split on the future metro line. By reconcil-ing landscape and industrial architecture, the proposed building complex offers a framework for presenting various kinds of modifiable content, for both the pres-ent and the future.

Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

New curriculum standard, new concept, new pattern - Thinking and practice about construction of science museum in primary schools

Why build a "Science Museum" in primary school? How to develop and implement "Science Museum" project? In this paper, the practice of Group of Xiao Xiao Science and Engineering in the Science Museum of Primary School Attached to Nanjing Xiaozhuang University is taken as an example. The Science Museum introduces learning new curriculum standard, putting the new concept into practice, promotion the Science Museum with the Science and technology activities and science courses organic integration. At the same time, it also discusses how to develop the curriculum by relying on the Group of Xiao Xiao Science and Engineering. To promote the "little gentleman" system, Developing a new learning model of the Group of Xiao Xiao Science and Engineering.

Play the Pain: A Digital Strategy for Play-Oriented Research and Action

The value of understanding patients' illness experience and social contexts for advancing medicine and clinical care is widely acknowledged. However, methodologies for rigorous and inclusive data gathering and integrative analysis of biomedical, cultural, and social factors are limited. In this paper, we propose a digital strategy for large-scale qualitative health research, using play (as a state of being, a communication mode or context, and a set of imaginative, expressive, and game-like activities) as a research method for recursive learning and action planning. Our proposal builds on Gregory Bateson's cybernetic approach to knowledge production. Using chronic pain as an example, we show how pragmatic, structural and cultural constraints that define the relationship of patients to the healthcare system can give rise to conflicted messaging that impedes inclusive health research. We then review existing literature to illustrate how different types of play including games, chatbots, virtual worlds, and creative art making can contribute to research in chronic pain. Inspired by Frederick Steier's application of Bateson's theory to designing a science museum, we propose DiSPORA (Digital Strategy for Play-Oriented Research and Action), a virtual citizen science laboratory which provides a framework for delivering health information, tools for play-based experimentation, and data collection capacity, but is flexible in allowing participants to choose the mode and the extent of their interaction. Combined with other data management platforms used in epidemiological studies of neuropsychiatric illness, DiSPORA offers a tool for large-scale qualitative research, digital phenotyping, and advancing personalized medicine.

The author's program "Natural Science Museum in the Life of a Modern School" as a way of realizing the culture-creating and pedagogical potential of natural science museums

This article deals with the implementation by teachers of secondary schools of the culture-creating and pedagogical potential of natural science museums with the help of the author's program. At the moment, there is a situation where society needs a holistic and informative potential of the museum. Modern education in the educational process is increasingly based on a number of museum disciplines. The museum, being a socio-cultural institution, directly influences the solution of crisis situations of civilization in the XXI century. It should be noted that the pedagogical position put forward by the authors on the potential of natural science museums, reflected in this article, is relevant not only for our country, but also for the whole world affected by globalization. The authors of the article, based on the findings of the study, compiled an author's program for teachers of secondary schools, in which they tried to reveal the main points on the implementation of the culture-creating and pedagogical potential of natural science museums.

Hong Kong Student Science Project Competition 2021

The Hong Kong Student Science Project Competition (HKSSPC) promotes the interest in science and technology among youth, develops their creativity and critical thinking skills through an innov ative application of science and technology, and ignites their passions and career interests in these areas. This year, the HKSSPC was organized by The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, the Education Bureau, the Hong Kong Science Museum, and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. Furthermore, it was supported by the Innovation and Technology Commission and the Hong Kong Young Academic of Sciences. We extend our thanks to all these groups for making this year’s competition a success. STEM Fellowship collaborated with the HKSSPC Secretariat to provide youth from Hong Kong with the unique opportunity to submit their work in the STEM Fellowship Journal. This year’s theme was “Inspiration from Living - Innovation from Science” with an emphasis on United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The broad scope of the competition allowed participants to submit their work in a variety of areas such as water pollution, nanoparticles, artificial intelligence systems, agriculture, environmental health, plastics, waste reduction, and many more. We are pleased to share the creativity and ambitious drive for research demonstrated by HKSSPC’s participants in these proceedings. We would like to congratulate every passionate individual who participated in the HKSSPC this year and wish them the best in their future STEM-related endeavours.

Science Museum in a Pizza Box - Performance, museum tour guiding, and science communication

<p>This study focuses on the relationship between performance and museum tour guiding. Building on the analysis of this relationship, the author of this study has created a performance that is inspired by museum guided tours. The aim of the performance is to encourage a critical reflection on the role and the function of science in contemporary society, while giving insight into how science is socially constructed. The performance is based on participation. The participants define their own experiences, actively reflecting on the value that science has in their lives through a dialogue with the other participants and the performer. This dialogue starts with exhibits based on science that are presented to the participants. To develop this performance, this research has utilised action research, and qualitative methods to explore the participants’ experiences of the performance. This study is interdisciplinary, and connects performance studies, museum studies and science communication, while using applied research to explore its topics. The outcomes of this study are an innovative conceptualisation of the museum guided tour, and an original approach to science communication based on dialogic, live performance.</p>