Research on Virtual Reality Interactive Teaching under the Environment of Big Data

After decades of progress in virtual reality, the key technologies among them have reached the foundation to support the development of the virtual reality industry. Immersive virtual reality classroom is a bold attempt to combine present-day information science and technology with innovative teaching concepts, which inherits the characteristics of existing online education such as short and compact, large-scale, and free and open. Combined with immersive virtual reality technology, virtual reality classrooms will present strong. The virtual reality classroom will present a strong sense of immersion, interactivity, and conceptualization. This paper elaborates on the development history of virtual reality and its future development direction from the technical perspective and educational perspective, respectively. Taking Civic Science course as an example, after analyzing the feasibility and development significance of immersive virtual reality interactive teaching classroom in detail, the design scheme of immersive virtual reality classroom is proposed, the characteristics and advantages of virtual immersive virtual reality classroom are discussed, and the application of immersive virtual reality technology to classroom teaching is explored. Combined with the constructed virtual reality classroom, the testing, analysis, and evaluation work should be completed and corresponding improvements should be made to better meet the personalized learning needs of learners.

Place-Based Environmental Civic Science: Urban Students Using STEM for Public Good

In the United States, Black and Latinx students are underrepresented in STEM courses and careers due to a dearth of culturally relevant opportunities, which in turn are connected to broader issues of social justice. Place-based environmental civic science offers potential for addressing these issues by enabling students to apply their STEM learning to mitigate local environmental problems. By civic science we refer to science in which all citizens, not just experts, engage for the public good. In this paper, we report on a study in which we followed middle-and high-school science and math classes in urban schools serving racial/ethnic minoritized students as they engaged in an innovative contextualized curriculum—a place-based civic science model in which students work with STEM community partners to address an environmental issue in their community. We draw from students’ open-ended reflections on what they learned from participating in place-based environmental civic science projects that could help their communities. Thematic analyses of reflections collected from 291 students point to beliefs in the usefulness of science to effect community change. Students articulated the science they learned or used in the project and how it could affect their community; they made references to real world applications of science in their project work and made links between STEM and civic contributions. In their own words, the majority of students noted ways that STEM was relevant to their communities now or in the future; in addition, a subset of students expressed changes in their thinking about how they personally could apply science to positively impact their communities and the ties between STEM and social justice. Analyses also point to a sense of confidence and purpose students gained from using STEM learning for their goals of community contribution. Results of this study suggest that focusing on local place as a foundation for students’ STEM learning and linking that learning to the civic contributions they can make, cultivates students’ perceptions of how they can use science to benefit their communities. Findings also suggest that engaging students in place-based civic science work provides effective foundations for nurturing STEM interest and addressing the underrepresentation of youth of color in STEM.

(Mis)informed about what? What it means to be a science-literate citizen in a digital world

Science literacy is often held up as crucial for avoiding science-related misinformation and enabling more informed individual and collective decision-making. But research has not yet examined whether science literacy actually enables this, nor what skills it would need to encompass to do so. In this report, we address three questions to outline what it should mean to be science literate in today’s world: 1) How should we conceptualize science literacy? 2) How can we achieve this science literacy? and 3) What can we expect science literacy’s most important outcomes to be? If science literacy is to truly enable people to become and stay informed (and avoid being misinformed) on complex science issues, it requires skills that span the “lifecycle” of science information. This includes how the scientific community produces science information, how media repackage and share the information, and how individuals encounter and form opinions on this information. Science literacy, then, is best conceptualized as encompassing three dimensions of literacy spanning the lifecycle: Civic science literacy, digital media science literacy, and cognitive science literacy. Achieving such science literacy, particularly for adults, poses many challenges and will likely require a structural perspective. Digital divides, in particular, are a major structural barrier, and community literacy and building science literacy into media and science communication are promising opportunities. We end with a discussion of what some of the beneficial outcomes could be—and, as importantly, will likely not be—of science literacy that furthers informed and critical engagement with science in democratic society.

The adaptation of scientific reasoning of prospective teachers for primary education in the perspective of civic science

This article aims to determine the adaptation of prospective elementary school teachers' scientific reasoning from a civic science perspective through seminar courses on elementary schools' educational problems. The issue of distance learning during the Corona Virus Disease (Covid) 19 pandemic in Indonesia has led to various highlights and analyzes. The learning scheme's quality and learning scheme are among the most popular questions in this learning scheme. This research uses a case study with a qualitative approach with data collection using interviews, observation, documentation, and literature studies. The results showed that the adaptation of the scientific reasoning of prospective elementary school teachers in a civic science perspective through the Seminar on Educational Problems in Primary Schools has several characteristics, that is: 1) educational problems in primary schools captured by dominant students in technological literacy, 2) study of educational problems in schools fundamental relates to the realization of smart and good citizens that reflected in attitudes and behavior in the Covid-19 pandemic situation, and 3) there is character building in the adaptation of scientific reasoning in the civic science perspective. Therefore, the research expects to have implications in developing civic education knowledge, especially in elementary school, which aims to strengthen the study of civic education.

The Global Network for Geoscience and Society: Connecting Science to Serve the Public Good

<p>The challenges we face today, global warming, environmental degradation, resource depletion, habitat loss, and their associated social impacts, require coordination and collaboration between geoscientists and other societal stakeholders for us to craft effective solutions.  These same problems often require coordinated actions across borders, and the people trying to solve these problems, locally and regionally, often suffer from a lack of resources and insufficient access to scientific expertise.</p><p>It is especially important for geoscientists to participate in and advance a culture of civic science, in which societal needs and diverse perspectives shape science, and scientific discoveries inform public understanding, decisions, and policies. This is done by expanding our capacity to support scientists who engage with decision makers and members of the public, both individually and collectively. </p><p>It is for this reason that a group of geoscientists and educators have come together to create the <strong>Global Network for Geoscience and Society.  </strong>Our mission is to strengthen cooperation and catalyze actions that support the global geoscience community by providing a network that enables collaboration and extends to all an opportunity to partner with others to advance resilience and sustainability.</p><p>Founded by volunteers from the GSA, the EGU, the AGU, Geology in the Public Interest, Geology for Global Development, the Geological Survey of Sweden, the Geological Society of London, and several universities and other organizations, the Network will bridge the gap between geoscientists and other communities so that they can collaborate to develop sustainable, context-appropriate solutions.  It will highlight opportunities for civic-minded geoscientists and others to address societal challenges related to natural resource exploitation, environmental contamination, natural hazards, and climate change. </p><p>Building upon existing successful programs such as AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange, the Network will create avenues to connect programs and people to advance resilience and sustainability.  It will provide civic science resources for geoscientists and advocate for effective and equitable collaborations to advance locally expressed development priorities.  It will promote the elevation of community voices that are not always heard, such as indigenous groups, women, the impoverished, and communities of faith, and it will establish a mechanism to advise community groups and organizations that require assistance with problems that involve the geosciences and sustainability.</p><p>If you are a geoscientist interested in sustainability, or if you represent a government agency, a foundation or nonprofit, or a forward-looking for-profit corporation, we invite you to join us.  Send us an email ([email protected]) and we’ll be in touch.  </p>

The ProSiberia Platform: The First Year of Operation and Development Prospects

The article aims to review the experience of creating and launching the ProSiberia platform, and to discuss the prospects for its further development. Based on the aggregation of digital sources of Siberian origin, the ProSiberia project aims to create a research platform that will bring together scholars, content curators (libraries, museums, archives) and society in order to study Siberia and position the region in the global information space. Work on the platform began in 2020 within the framework of the Program for Increasing the Competitiveness of National Research Tomsk State Unversity by the staff of the Tomsk State University Research Library. Now the platform has implemented opportunities both for humanitarian researchers and for civic science representatives (volunteers). For researchers, access to digital copies of texts about Siberia with detailed description and full-text search is organized; it is possible to create one’s own collections of texts; there are some text collaboration tools. It is also possible to find researchers with similar interests and exchange views. A volunteer can edit texts, operate a blog, participate in challenges. The platform is also being filled with new texts. Prospects for the development of the project are considered; they were formulated based on the results of surveys and focus groups. The main directions of development include: work on improving the quality of texts (attracting volunteers for their correct recognition); aggregation of digital tools for the humanities in one place for effective work with texts; attraction of partners; integration into the educational process. The most difficult issue is the aggregation of digital tools. The article lists their most interesting groups: tools for creating and working with digital facsimiles, textometric tools, and a number of tools for working with digitized manuscripts. Thus, at the moment, the initial version of the ProSiberia platform has been created. It allows implementing remotely the basic functions characteristic for any research in the field of humanities. However, most probably, the most important and difficult will be the next stage of the work, which includes, among other things, the aggregation of digital tools for working with the text of interest for the researcher. Therefore, it is extremely important to have a broad discussion in the professional community of both the work already done within the ProSiberia project and the further prospects for its development.

Toward Environmental Justice in Civic Science: Youth Performance and Experience Measuring Air Pollution Using Moss as a Bio-Indicator in Industrial-Adjacent Neighborhoods

This article reports on an interdisciplinary evaluation of the pilot phase of a community-driven civic science project. The project investigates the distribution of heavy metals in air pollution using moss growing on street trees as a bio-indicator in two industrial-adjacent neighborhoods in Seattle, Washington (USA). One goal of the ongoing project is to meaningfully engage local urban youths (eighth to twelfth grade) in the scientific process as civic scientists, and teach them about environmental health, environmental justice, and urban forestry concepts in a place-based, urban-oriented environmental research project. We describe the collaborative context in which our project developed, evaluate the quality of youth-collected data through analysis of replicate samples, and assess participants’ learning, career interests, and overall appraisal of the pilot. Our results indicate that youth scientists collected usable samples (with acceptable precision among repeated samples), learned project content (with statistically significant increases in scores of test-style survey questions; p = 0.002), and appraised their engagement favorably (with 69% of participants reporting they liked the project). We observed few changes in career interests, however. We discuss our intention to use these preliminary insights to further our community-driven education, research, and action model to address environmental injustices.