FutureDude on Venus

Today I'm sharing an interview with Jeffrey Morris, lead author and artist for the new graphic novel Venus: Daedalus One.  Jeffrey has a beautifully illustrated online magazine that celebrates science and exploration, and he's currently running a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the creation of his second planetary graphic novel, Mars: Daedalus Two.

 Jeffrey is a gentle person with a real dedication to kids and the future, and his comics are exciting while still managing to stay free of the sexism and violence that mar so much of this art form.

How do you make a graphic novel? 

We start with a solid story concept with strong visual potential—which in the case of Venus: Daedalus One was a 110-page feature film script. As an illustrator, I also created a dozens of pencil sketches and marker renderings to get a sense of what the world in our story looked like. Many of these were translated into computer generated images that we could fly around and manipulate. All of the aforementioned media served as the basis for a comic artist to begin building the actual panels and pages. I worked hand in hand with him and colorists to bring the full vision of the script to life in comic form.

What's Venus like, and what made you decide to write about it?

I wanted to tell a futuristic story set within our own solar system with a focus on one of the inner planets.  Quite a few books and movies have taken place on Mars, while virtually none have occurred on Venus. I think a primary reason is that Venus is a pretty inhospitable place. Searing heat, crushing pressure and scalding acid are the norm. There is no water and little to no chance of life as we know it. I thought it would be fun to throw a group of conflicted characters into a environment that challenging.

Do you think we'll find life on other planets in our solar system?

Absolutely! It is inevitable and just a matter of time. The key question is whether or not human curiosity can outpace waning public interest, partisan politics, and shrinking science budgets. Eventually, we need human minds, eyes, and hands directly on location throughout the Solar System in order to use our innate instincts and intuition to help us uncover the clues that will lead us to life. However, in the meantime, we should continue to launch a barrage of space probes, like NASA's Curiosity, to every possible destination. They are our emissaries for now.

What are you working on next?

I currently am developing Mars: Daedalus Two and several other realistic science fiction stories. Each is part of an ever-expanding world of hard science-fiction titles. My team and I want to establish a niche for ourselves as the purveyors of visually stunning futuristic media that entertains, educates and never underestimates the intelligence of the audience.

Ten years from now, looking back on your work, what do you hope to see?
I hope to have made a real difference in the average person's perception of tomorrow while energizing a base of individuals to work for a better future. I intend to do this by building several successful hard sci-fi franchises that are able to expand into numerous areas or media and entertainment that can truly withstand the test of time. After all, my stories are envisioning and often predicting the future! 

Lexicon and Tumblehome at the US Science and Engineering Festival

The 2nd USA Science and Engineering Festival enchanted and inspired visitors in Washington, DC last weekend, and I was there, representing both the Lexicon series and Tumblehome Learning.

A corner of the festival during setup, before the crowds

Six members of my family attended, along with 150,000 other visitors over the course of three days. Seven Tumblehome staff and all four of our authors also attended for at least part of the weekend.

Kids try out some activities

In our two combined booths, we set up posters, signs, and activities for Tumblehome Learning, the Land of Lexicon, and Morris Future Comics, the franchise that created our new graphic novel Venus: Daedalus One.  We gave away tattoo stickers and trilobite keychains.  At our main acitivity table, Peter Wong and Kristine ran a cycle of activities including making and painting plaster trilobites, experimenting with static electricity, and completing a flat circuit made of copper tape to make a buzzer sound.
At another table, kids examined fossils, real or fake, with a microscope that projected images onto a screen.  The kids could also examine tiny crystals of industrial diamonds and diamonds incorporated into the surface of silicon and other materials.

Fossils and diamond coatings.

Finally, at the front, kids and parents did Tangram puzzles from the Lexicon Villages event and did a simple experiment about heat transfer and thermal paper.

Rebecca helps a visitor with a heat transfer experiment

 Meanwhile, out the side of our booth we played a continuous loop of a slideshow and soundtrack for the first song of our upcoming Lexicon musical.  The song in called "Because Girls Can't Do Math."  Although the title is ironic, so many visitors got huffy at the very notion that we changed the title on the spot to "Because Girls Can('t?) Do Math."

A steady stream of visitors flowed through our booth all weekend, looking, playing, listening, signing up for more information, and buying. While kids did the activities, parents talked with our authors, Jeffrey Morris (author of Venus) and Michael Erb (author of Kelvin McCloud and the Seaside Storm).

Michael Erb (left) and Jeffrey Morris sign their books.

 The two activity kits and all four books available sold well, and visitors clamored for the two--Tumblehome Learning's The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil and Scarletta's Ice Castle-- that are coming soon.

Owen checks out Ice Castle

  The festival itself was magnificent.  Where else can kids see a space capsule, climb into an F-16 jet,

take apart an iPad, learn physics and circus tricks together, extract DNA, walk through the Magic Schoolbus,

Visitors line up to enter the Magic School Bus

enter a Rubik's cube contest,

Crowds watching the Rubik's cube challenge

Besides and see the Mythbusters all in one day?  I had very little time to wander, but a did visit a few friends from the informal science world to see volunteers from 4H and the National Girls Collaborative Project running activities for younger kids.

Between manning the booth and visiting friends, I had a couple of author events to attend.  One highlight was participating on an evening author panel about communicating science through books.  Robin Cook of Coma and Outbreak fame, the creator of the medical thriller genre, delivered the keynote.  Other writers included the great kids' nonfiction writer Joy Hakim and rocket boy turned multi-genre author Homer Hickam.

Penny and Homer Hickam after the author panel

After Robin's talk, the six of us then sat on stage answering questions about how we came to write about science and our writing process.

Book signing after the author panel

I also gave a Featured Author talk Sunday morning.  Unfortunately, it was first thing Sunday morning, in a rather hard-to-find but huge room two floors away from the festival main action, so if my family hadn't been ranged in the front when I started, I would have felt pretty lonely.  Luckily, people trickled in as I spoke, and a decent audience gathered in time to see me use my Personal Assistant time machine to summon Roy Chapman Andrews, the paleontologist who served as the model for Indiana Jones.

A visit from Roy Chapman Andrews, aka Barnas Monteith

I also gave a Featured Author talk Sunday morning.  Unfortunately, it was first thing Sunday morning, in a rather hard-to-find but huge room two floors away from the festival main action, so if my family hadn't been ranged in the front when I started, I would have felt pretty lonely.  Luckily, people trickled in as I spoke, and a decent audience gathered in time to see me use my Personal Assistant time machine to summon Roy Chapman Andrews, the paleontologist who served as the model for Indiana Jones. Roy stormed onto the stage in a panic about the Mongolian raiders chasing him in a scene taken more or less straight from Barnas Monteith's Fraudulent Fossil.

Rhianon drops by her mother's book signing station

All this week the Tumblehome team has been recovering and following up from the fair.  We sent copies of the song and coupons for THL products to all who signed up for them.  We've begun entering our books on Amazon. We've established our warehousing and fulfilled new orders, updated our brochure and put the finishing touches on Fraudulent Fossil so it's ready for printing. We're already planning for a second run of Venus.

All in all, the festival was a wonderful place for the launch of a new science book and activity company.  It was also a joyful event, and when (if) it happens again, all of you should bring your favorite children and attend!

Helping girls enjoy science

The National Girls Collaborative Project brings together providers of informal science programs geared toward girls.  Projects range from a science and art club for 8 first grade girls to programs involving thousands upon thousands of Girl Scouts.  These programs provide role models, mentors, fun places to be social, alternative television shows and computer games, and opportunities for girls to be caretakers of their communities or the earth.

April 25 - 27, running into the USA Science and Engineering Festival, the NGCP will be holding a conference in Washington, DC.  At the conference, leaders of programs for girls will learn more about resources, practices, evaluation, engineering programs, and more.  In honor of that fact, I wrote a blog post about inspiring girls in science for the Tumblehome Learning website.

National Governors Association Embraces Informal Science Education

Yesterday, the National Governors Association released an issue brief outlining the benefits of informal science education-- hands-on, group-based programs led by museums or after-school clubs.  (Full disclosure - the Noyce Foundation funded the writing of this brief, and the governors endorsed it.)

The brief cites research showing that such programs (1) increase student confidence, interest, and achievement in mathematics and science, and (2) increase student interest in science and technology careers.  To demonstrate such effects, programs usually have to operate over time.  Kids who participate in clubs or summer programs often attend over more than one year.  Other ties they attend yearlong programs at a museum, zoo, or university.  Just as important are professional development programs that help teachers lead hands-on experiments and science projects, and programs where museums or research institutions bring expertise, resources, cool equipment and demonstrations directly to the classroom.

Not discussed in the brief, because  more difficult to measure, are the cumulative effects over time of many smaller exposures to informal science -- museum, zoo and aquarium visits; Omni movies; Family Science nights; kids' science magazines; campouts at a nature center; etc.  The NGA brief emphasizes learning more than delight and inspiration, but that's all right.

The report goes on to describe a number of different groups and programs, from Techbridge for girls to the National 4H science initiative to the St. Louis Science Center's YES program and Dean Kamen's FIRST robotics league.  Each program described has evaluation data supporting its effectiveness.

Wrapping up, the brief concludes with four recommendations for state executives:

(1) Make informal science education a key part of their agenda to improve STEM learning. Include informal science representatives on key advisory groups and encourage STEM councils to identify and promote programs with demonstrated results.

(2) Continue to support quality informal science programs in the state, such as those offered by museums and science centers, recognizing that such support will often be matched several times over by public donations and grants.

(3) Encourage districts to support project-based STEM learning in after-school environments.

(4) Get the STEM Council or state education agency to create an online catalogue of informal science activities and their program evaluations, for use by schools, teachers, parents, and students.

There's a lot more of value for parents and educators in the brief itself.  I encourage you to read it here.  Or read the Education Week article about it here.

Keep your kids interested in science and engineering

Some elementary teachers love science and get their students involved in fantastic investigations of rocks, frogs, weather -- you name it. But some teachers are swamped by the demands of tested subjects like math and reading; others lack materials; still others are a little afraid of science and all they don't know. The truth is no kid can count on having a great science class every year. So how can parents keep those young minds fired up about the beauty and possibility of science?

Here's a blog post with ten suggestions. On the Tumblehome Learning website, we'll keep posting news, ideas, and opinions about inspiring kids in science and engineering.

Tumblehome Learning Board Meeting

Tumblehome Learning is now six months old. Friday we held our first official board meeting, with partners from Minneapolis and Taipei as well as Boston gathering here on the east coast. To kick off the meeting Thursday evening, our science kit guru Peter Wong organized us into three groups to compete in a series of scientific cooking challenges. These ranged from identifying different brands of cheese to designing foil devices that allowed us to pour black-and-tans while keeping the layers as separate as possible to estimating time to cook shrimp and beef with various cooking methods.

We laughed a lot, and I'm proud to say that the red team (my team) tied for first place in the salad dressing competition. Peter is quite a chef, and he used to teach a one-unit cooking course in the engineering department at Tufts. I think it was called "Heat Transfer in the Kitchen," or something like that.

Friday we spent working on vision. We are a company that inspires kids to imagine themselves as scientists and engineers through hands-on activities supported by books and online materials. We intend to put the kids'experience of science at the center, rather than defining ourselves as a publisher with ancillary materials. Two of our kits are already designed, which meant we spent some time looking at package design. Four of our first seven books are already written and two more are mostly written. We debated product mix for 2013, when we hope to have up to twelve new books. The big news on the book front is that we will officially begin accepting submissions on January 15, a week from today.

The rest of the meeting was about financial projections and job plans. I won't bore you with those. But I will encourage any of you who happen to be in Taiwan the first week in February to stop in and visit our booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Booth A907 in Hall 1. You'll recognize us by the big posters of Selectra Volt, Dudette from the Future, and the boy hero of The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil standing on a T. Rex skull.

Tumblehome Learning Announces its Presence

Tumblehome Learning has announced its presence to the publishing world. This week, Publishers Weekly online and Children's Bookshelf (scroll down) presented articles about publisher Ian Leask leaving his beloved Scarletta Press to devote more time to our startup, Tumblehome Learning. The announcement made us scramble to get our new website up several weeks ahead of schedule.

In the bold words of our president, Barnas Monteith,

Make no mistake -- Tumblehome Learning is not a publisher. It is a science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) education revolution. THL's product suite offers a continuous learning program from elementary through high school grades. Our reading materials feature exciting adventures and leading-edge "real world" science & engineering content along with self-paced hands-on activity lessons. A wide variety of different subject materials assure that there's something of interest for everyone.

Our goal is not just to make kids more successful in school, but to offer them an alternative pathway to opportunity and fulfillment throughout life--a pathway of genuine interest in subjects they learn to love and subsequently love to learn about. THL's innovative books, kits and other products inspire kids of all backgrounds and ages to become fascinated by the pursuit of scientific truth. At Tumblehome Learning, we believe that as fun proceeds, knowledge exceeds!

Tumblehome Learning began nine months ago with four friends talking about kids, science, books and experiments, and the idea of science playdates. Almost six months ago we incorporated. Since then we've been writing, searching for books, designing activities, editing, finding partners, working with suppliers and distributors, and generally having the time of our lives. We are operating out of Boston, Minneapolis, and Taipei, and our team has grown to ten. We plan to make a big splash in 2012 with the release of our first seven books.

Tumblehome Learning will showcase our products-in-process at our Asian launch at the Taipei International Book Exhibition in February and again at the USA Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in Washington, DC, April 28-29. We will have our first books, including a graphic novel, plus plenty of activities for families to try. Not only that, I'm a featured author, speaking Sunday at 10 am. Come join us!

And for all you authors out there, in mid-January we will begin looking at book proposals and queries. Check under Submissions on our website.

New Frontiers in Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is an ongoing process of checking students' understanding and then adjusting instruction to best respond to student needs. This process of checking and meeting students where they are takes more teacher skill and flexibility than just marching through a pre-set curriculum, but it should lead to greater learning.

Today is the official release date for New Frontiers in Formative Assessment from Harvard Education Press. Almost two years ago the Noyce Foundation asked me to help share some of the best assessment work of our staff and grantees. I thought a book bringing together interesting work in the field might do the trick, so I put together a proposal, convinced the Harvard folks, and found a co-editor, Dan Hickey, who is an expert on assessment.

Together we solicited authors for twelve chapters on assessment projects and practices. Half the chapters describe the use of technology to aid assessment, often building it right into a learning program. Six more use simple paper and pencil tools to get at students' thinking.

The chapters are evenly divided among math, literacy, and science. It's our contention that different subjects require different approaches to assessment, and we provide plenty of real examples from the projects our authors have run. One chapter discusses techniques for teaching science vocabulary to young English language learners. Another examines how students can label and share graphs among networked computers in a classroom, and another describes a process for preparing teachers to look collaboratively and with diagnostic acumen at students' work in mathematics.

Lorrie Shepard of the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote an insightful foreword, discussing how testing can harm learning and how the chapters of the book provide an alternative. And Dylan Wiliam, assessment maven, gave us this blurb:

This is an extraordinary book. The chapters cover practical applications of formative assessment in mathematics, science, and language arts, including the roles of technology and teachers professional learning. I found my own thinking about formative assessment constantly being stretched and challenged. Anyone who is involved in education will find something of value in this book

.
Working with the authors of these chapters was a privilege, and I'm proud of the book that resulted. I hope that teachers, curriculum developers, and other educators will find it useful. In coming posts I'll give short summaries of selected chapters.

Bob Tinker, playful physicist and education innovator

Today is Bob Tinker's 70th birthday. Bob is a low-temperature physicist who early in his career moved to Alabama to teach in a black college and march in Civil Rights marches. Later he led TERC in Cambridge, MA, and pioneered the use of probeware to allow students and adults to participate in citizen science. He helped develop Global Lab and the National Geographic Kids Network, alllowing kids all over the world to collaborate on environmental projects.

I met Bob shortly after he founded the Concord Consortium in 1994. At Concord he launched the first Virtual High School, which continues to stand out for its collaborative model and the quality of its courses. Although Bob officially retired as president of the Concord Consortium a few years ago, he continues to consult and collaborate on projects ranging from modeling the behavior of atoms to building "smart graphs" that teach students about what graphs tell us and how they're made.

Yesterday the Concord Consortium folks had a birthday party for Bob in the MIT Museum, a perfect location to reflect his innovative spirit and dedication to advancing the common good. As guests entered, they were greeted by a full-size cutout model of Bob that looked startlingly real. When Bob and his wife Barbara showed up, the resemblance seemed even closer: Bob was wearing the same clothes as his cutout.

Old friends ate hors-d'oeuvres and caught up, and then a few reminisced. They talked about Bob's unfailing optimism and good cheer, his encouraging ways as a mentor, and the spirit of play that constantly animates him. They saluted his skills as a writer and his unfailing willingness to write yet one more well-crafted, exciting grant application to the National Science Foundation. They paid tribute to the energizing work environment he creates around him.

So, Bob, Happy Birthday, and may you keep on playing!

Raising daVincis with STEAM

We should be integrating the arts more into STEM education--that's the argument explored in an intriguing new article from EdWeek. STEM should become STEAM, because engineering design and invention require some of the same creativity and ability to think outside the box as does artistic exploration.

The article offers some fascinating tidbits and models. For example, there's the tantalizing fact that Nobel scientists are 22 times more likely than other scientists to be involved in the performing arts. There's a description of the biodegradable water bottle that one this year's ArtScience prize. Here's a video from the Wolf Trap Foundation showing how the performing arts can help young children "feel" mathematics in their bodies.

Of course, as Noyce Foundation trustee Alan Friedman points out in the article, there are big differences between art and science as ways of knowing. Think, for example, of how a piece of work in evaluated. In both art and science, boldness of vision and originality may be important. But in the end, a piece of scientific work is evaluated by whether it can be reproduced, whether it proves to be true. Though Keats says, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," the two are different.

I tend not to think of myself as artistic, but people remind me writing is an art form. In college I read poetry in the cell biology lab and then went off to my creative writing class to write stories about the adventure of scientific discovery. And to my surprise, Lost in Lexicon's playful approach to mathled to my selection as a featured author at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in April. During my talk I plan to play a Lexicon song titled "Girls Can't Do Math," which comes from the village of Tessellate--more arts integration.

Teachers of Lost in Lexicon have integrated the arts with the book as well. One teacher asked kids to paint scenes from the book as they read. Dotty Corbiere challenges kids and adults to represent mathematical ideas from the book in Lego sculptures. And I'll take the integration of science and art further in the second Lexicon book, The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music.

Bringing art into STEM will motivate more kids to give STEM a try. It will help kids think about science and mathematics in new ways. Even if they don't all grow up to be Leonardo da Vinci or even Steve Jobs, that's a good thing.

Online learning that works for science teachers

The online SciPacks tool of the National Science Teachers Association helps teachers and their students learn more science. That's the conclusion of a just-released independent evaluation by Edvantia, Inc, and it's good news. For several years, ever since writing an Ed Week article on how difficult it is to find evidence that professional development "works," I've been on the lookout for studies like this one.

Sure, there are plenty of evaluations that show that teachers liked their professional development, found it useful, and report they learned from it or even changed their practices as a result. There are relatively few studies that actually pre- and post-test teachers to measure their learning gains. Even more rare are studies showing that professional development for teachers led to greater learning among those teachers' students. But isn't that what we really care about? We work with teachers so students will learn more.

This was a good study. New Houston middle school science teachers or fifth grade teachers with at least a year of teaching experience were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Each group was then given access to one of the two SciPacks (online ten-hour mini-courses) under study, and the two groups served as controls for each other. One group studied the Earth's Changing Surface while the other studied Force and Motion. During the learning window, teachers logged into each of the two units an average of 15 times. Teachers filled out surveys about their science teaching practices and took tests of their content knowledge before and after using the SciPacks.

Following use of the SciPacks, teachers showed a gain of half a standard deviation in their confidence in teaching the topic covered. "Treated" teachers also showed a gain in content knowledge for the topic studied of about 17 percentile points, as compared to gains of 5 to 12 percentile points for the control teachers. Even more interesting were the student results. Fifth graders who had teachers in the treatment group gained 17 percentile points from pre- to post-test on earth science concepts, and 6th and 8th graders gained 10 percentile points on force and motion concepts, compared to 12 and 3 point gains for students who studied the same material but whose teachers had not had the professional development.

That's a very respectable linkage. Teachers who underwent online, self-paced and self-monitored professional development gained knowledge and confidence, and their students learned more than the students of teachers who did not have the same experience. NSTA deserves praise for its careful work in creating and testing these modules. So far there are 22 SciPacks available, covering topics in all major areas of science, some geared to elementary school teachers and some to middle or high school teachers. And these are only one piece of the many tools available in the NSTA Learning Center. Let's hope they see wide use.

Students' cool discoveries in astronomy and paleontology

Today I ran across three articles about students making significant scientific discoveries. All of them depended on mentors helping to set up the question and parameters of the project, but nevertheless, it's the students who gathered the breakthrough data. What an exciting way to make a contribution to the world!

In the first discovery, a 22-year-old Australian student from Monash University found a big chunk of the universe's missing mass, which scientists had been seeking for decades. During a six-week summer project, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie looked for the missing mass in filaments, huge shoelace-like galactic projections with low density and extremely high temperatures. At such high temperatures (a million degrees Celsius), the mass should be visible at X-ray wavelengths, so Fraser-McKelvie did a "targeted X-ray search." Lo and behold, she found much greater mass than had been seen before.

The second discovery also came from summer work by a university student, this one Thomas Weinreich from Brown University. While carefully sorting through microscopic grains of lunar dust, Weinreich followed a hunch of his own. Along with separating the pieces of orange glass he'd been ask to look for, he also set aside tiny crystals flecked with black spots. It turned out that these crystals, called olivine, formed around molten rock from the moon's interior. When sent out for analysis, they proved to contain water--not huge amounts, but as much as in the earth's mantle, the layer just below the crust.

Finding deep water was big news. Although some ice has been found on the lunar surface, hidden in the shadow of craters, the idea until now has been that any surface ice came from comets striking the moon. Accepted ideas about the moon's origin suggest that it was created when a huge collision struck off a chunk of the early earth. The force of the collision would have caused such heat in the broken off chunk, which eventually became the moon, that its rocks would have melted and all its water evaporated. Now this finding of water deep within the moon challenges the accepted wisdom.

The last bit of news concerned a class of fourth graders doing citizen science, where ordinary citizens help scientists collect data. This particular project is called the Mastodon Matrix Project. During excavation of a pond eleven years ago in Hyde Park, NY, workers uncovered the bones of a mastodon, an ancient ancestor of the elephant. Excavators dug out the bones along with eleven tons of surrounding sediment. Now the Paleontological Research Institute ships out one-kilogram boxes of dirt to citizen scientists--hobbyists, clubs, school groups, dedicated amateurs--to sort through looking for twigs, teeth, shells, or anything else that gives a clue to the mastodon's ecosystem.

Using plastic magnifying glasses, fingers and toothpicks, the Pennsylvania students sifted carefully through their 2.2 pounds of dirt. They found shells, a twig, and finally an eight inch long strand of coarse brown hair. Full of the delight of discovery, the students weighed, labeled, and bagged their finds and sent them to project headquarters. Sure enough, the word came back that they had found a mastodon hair. The students had uncovered something that had been missing for 11,500 years.

There's something truly empowering about making a scientific discovery. To follow a hunch or to painstakingly carry out a procedure, to see what no one has seen, to find evidence that challenges or confirms a theory, brings an intrinsic reward that has nothing to do with grades or recognition. All of these students know they've been part of something big and important--the human quest to understand how the universe works. The more such experiences kids can have, the more we'll be raising a generation with the curiosity and discipline to keep making discoveries, keep learning, and keep pushing knowledge forward.

Middle Schoolers Saving Electricity

They call it "the Prius Effect." Prius owners can push a button and monitor their gas mileage from moment to moment. That simple feedback loop causes them to subtly change their driving habits. They ride the accelerator less heavily and press the brakes more gently. On average, their gas mileage increases by ten percent over time.

Now the Gulf of Maine Research Institute PowerHouse program plans to apply the same principle to electricity usage by harnessing the power of middle school students. In Maine, every 7th and 8th grader has a laptop computer issued through school. Moreover, by next year, 95% of Maine homes will have their own "smart" electricity meter. GMRI's plan is to teach middle schoolers about energy by allowing them to track and analyze energy use within their own homes while comparing it to regional and statewide averages. Over time, the theory is, the kids will become picky energy consumers. They'll start turning off lights and appliances and suggest energy-saving interventions to their parents.

It's another test of the power of a feedback loop to inform citizens and lead to change. But of course, it's also a tool for bringing STEM skills to kids, teaching them about electricity, graphing, analysis, and their own power as informed citizens, while involving them in real research about an environmental question that matters to them.

Explora - 2010 National Medal Winner

Part grandma's attic, part grandpa's garage, part science museum, part children's museum -- that's how Explora, a community treasure in Albuquerque, NM, bills itself. Last Saturday, the Noyce Foundation trustees took a field trip from our meeting in Santa Fe to find out why Explora won the 2010 National Medal for Museum and Library Service.

Imagine a museum in the arid highlands of New Mexico where you enter to a large fountain that invites you to control the direction and shape of the playing water. From there you follow a maze of curved walls. At every turn, a private nook invites a family to sit together around a hands-on display and try building a dam, turning a gear, or puck a string and see the waves its shadow makes on the wall. Signs are in Spanish and English, but there aren't many signs: the exhibits, and the challenges they present, are self-explanatory.

The Explora research staff had a hunch that small private spaces would increase family interaction and focus on the exhibits. To test their hunch, they took down the walls for a while, tracked visitor behavior, and then put the walls back up. With the walls in place, just over head high, visitors spent more than twice as long at any single exhibit. Unlike the rest of us in a world that has become like a mall, these visitors weren't immediately distracted by something else --something maybe more exciting, let me go check it!-- to see.

The invitation to stop, pause, and play continues throughout the museum, through sections on water, mechanics, sound, electricity, and build-it-yourself Rube Goldberg machines. At one point we emerged into the Paradox Cafe, which is set up like a small cafeteria with stools along a bar and chairs around small round tables. Instead of coffee, the tables served up 3-dimensional puzzles, inviting us to build pyramids or pack shapes into boxes clearly too small to hold them. The person staffing the cafe wouldn't allow me to move on until I had solved the puzzle I sat down to.

Besides the friendly use of space, the second most noticeable feature of the museum was the complete lack of computer displays. Most science museums and an increasing number of art museums rely on computers to extend their exhibits, but Explora has only exhibits that can be personally handled in three dimensions. There is no waiting for directions from a screen: you pick up the materials and do with them what you like. Moreover, none of the shelves, closets, or storage spaces in the museum are locked. Anyone can pull out additional materials to work with, and this atmosphere of trust leads to respectful use by visitors.

Underlying everything Explora does is a coherent philosophy articulated by its founder, Paul Tatter. Paul believes that a museum should not be primarily about knowledge but rather about thinking. He is convinced that learning comes with use: we only learn something when we use it. Learning thrives in a non-threatening, open environment as one solves the problems one sets oneself. True learning can't be directed to specific outcomes. Museum staff give encouragement and occasional suggestions, but no answers.

Nor is Explora confined to one building. Staff and volunteers carry displays and activities all over the state. Eighty-three of 86 New Mexico school districts have benefited from Explora this year. Now student interns are preparing to build a temporary outdoor museum in the park again this summer, as they do every year. The visitors are as diverse as the community. Currently Explora is working with the local residents of a housing project to expand into an outdoor pavilion where they can hold festivals of learning and culture for the residents, including the inhabitants of elderly housing next door.

Explora is remarkable because it cleaves to a guiding philosophy and it has an expansive view of its community. It's a beautiful building, and I wanted to stay a few more hours. The next time I visit Albuquerque, I'm definitely going back, and so should you.

In Praise of Science Friday

A year ago I caught a taxi at Reagan National Airport. The taxi driver, a young Ethiopian man, had the radio tuned to Science Friday, and I asked him if he listened to it often. "Oh, yes!" he said. "It is my favorite program!" While supporting his family and driving a taxi, this young man was also studying anatomy and physiology at a local community college, in hopes of becoming a physical therapist. Science Friday helped inspire in him the curiosity and ambition to reach for his dreams.

This afternoon I got in a dispute with my husband, who scoffed at my suggestion that Science Friday reaches a million listeners a week. So I looked it up. I was wrong: 1.3 million listeners a week tune in to hear Ira Flatow coax scientists to explain the latest discoveries and controversies. Not all those listeners are PhDs or science graduates: some of them are just plain curious adults, and some of them are teenagers who want to hear about everything from stem cells to HPV to extrasolar planets to the latest Internet technology.

Science Friday archives past programs, so if you want to find out more about, say, ice, the origins of kissing, how fleas jump, or how to build a subway, you can check the Science Friday website and download a past podcast. You can also watch videos on burrowing owls, a home-made 3D printer, fossils, or the physics of hair in Disney's animated movie Tangled. You can find science articles in Spanish and science blogs for teens on such topics as becoming a high altitude archeologist or the dangers of diet soda.

The associated "Talking Science" website includes sections for parents, teachers, and kids. There are resources for parents who want to do science activities at home, for middle school teachers who want to bring contemporary science connections to their classrooms, and for kids who want to explore science careers or just see what kinds of science other kids are doing. 'the truly adventurous among you can even explore Science Friday in Second Life.

In my opinion, Science Friday is a national treasure, one of the reasons the adult population of America is more scientifically literate than might be expected by our kids' test scores. I invite all of you to listen to the program, take a look around the website, and think about how you can use Science Friday to enrich your own science knowledge and that of our kids and neighbors.

What's happening to elementary science education?

At the same time that President Obama and the business community continue to tout the need for more and better science education, many scientists and educators worry that science is being squeezed out of elementary schools. Ever since the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, they say, subtle and not-so-subtle pressures to increase time on math and reading have meant less time for science and social studies. But what do we really know about where elementary teachers spend their time?

One of the more comprehensive sources of information is the National Center of Education Statistics' School and Staffing Survey, SASS. In their analysis of the 2007 report, Rolf Blank and Carla Toye report that between 1994 and 2004, in grades 4-6, the average reported time devoted to science instruction fell by 20%, from 3.5 hours per week to 2.8 hours. Mcmurrer in 2008 reported an average 43% decrease in elementary science time between the 2001 and 2006 school years, with final time being about 2.5 hours. At a more local level, Griffith and Scharman reported in 2008 that 59% of K-6 teachers in one midwestern state reported cutting science time since NCLB, with the majority cutting 31-90 minutes per week. And in California's Bay Area, packed with science and technology rich companies and institutions, a 2007 report from WestEd and the Lawrence Hall of Science reported that 80% of K-8 classroom teachers reported spending less than 60 minutes a week on science, with 16% reporting that they teach no science at all.

National NAEP data, drawn from questionnaires, give a rosier picture than the Bay Area, with teachers reporting a median time on science in fourth grade of between 2 and 2.9 hours per week. Similarly, 2007 TIMSS data suggest between 2 and 2.5 hours per week for fourth grade science. But these may both be overestimates. When my children were in elementary school, I was surprised to learn that they received science instruction only half the year, with social studies instruction taking up that time slot for the remaining 4.5 months. Might teachers be reporting the average number of hours per week on science based on only those weeks when they do teach science?

A study done by Jones and Swanson in Montana suggests this may be the case. These researchers, asking a selection of Montana teachers to fill out more extensive questionnaires, found that most teachers reported teaching science 1-2 hours per week, but that none of the teachers reported teaching science for more than 24 weeks a year.

Jones and Swanson concluded that members of this motivated group of teachers, who were voluntarily participating in a project to improve their science teaching, taught an average of 38 hours of science or less per year. Actual observations of lessons, moreover, showed that over 40% of them were shorter than the 30-40 minutes teachers reported as standard.

I don't know the ideal amount of science instruction for elementary school, but I suspect it's more than 40 hours a year, and I do think it's a question worth asking. For many students science can be an exciting break in the school routine, a time when they can get their hands and minds involved in trying out new ideas. For some, science becomes their favorite part of the day after lunch and recess. The chance to get up and do something can help re-engage fidgety children, and science content can enrich reading, writing, and math lessons.

Secondly, I think the data show that to really understand what instruction our kids are getting, we need to look under the hood and not passively accept general survey information. Only then can we find out if, as one teacher in the Jones and Swanson study said, “Science is the first subject to go whenever our schedule gets interrupted.”

New Science NAEP underlines challenges

Earlier this week, the new NAEP Science results came out, reporting that fewer than a third of American students in grades 4, 8, and 12 are proficient in science. What should we make of these results? Noyce Foundation trustee Alan Friedman and former director of the New York Hall of Science, provides some insights.

"Looking at the results, I was rather dismayed at the relatively lackluster performance at the top of the achievement levels, especially at the critical twelfth-grade level." Only 1-2% of students tested achieved at the highest, Advanced, level, and Friedman worries that this bodes ill for our national drive to increase preparation for science and engineering careers.

Friedman does, however, point out some positives. For one thing, the new science NAEP (NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress) is a good test. It goes "far beyond rote memorization," asking students to critique experiments and even to answer computer-based questions that explore students' ability to analyze data or design their own experiments. These more in-depth questions have not yet been scored, but over time they should show how well students are able to apply what they learn in science.

Second, Friedman, a lifelong champion of hands-on, applied science learning, sees evidence to support his view that this kind of learning benefits students. As he points out, "It’s not just about learning facts in a classroom. It’s doing activities where you put your understanding of science principles into action.... Fourth-graders who were in classrooms that engaged in hands-on science activities once a week or more, for example. . . scored 7 points higher on NAEP than their peers who were in classrooms that engaged in science activities less frequently. The pattern was most dramatic in California, where the score difference between those two groups in the fourth grade was 15 points." This big difference may reflect the fact that in the wake of No Child Left Behind, science instruction has become rare event in California elementary schools - averaging less than thirty minutes a week in one Bay Area study.

Involvement in science outside of school can be just as important - maybe more so. Students in grades 8 and 12 who reported "do[ing] science related activities not for schoolwork" scored 5 to about 15 points higher than students who said they didn't do science outside of school. Now, this may just be a sign that those students who are interested in science do better in science. Still, it does suggest that providing science experiences outside of school is worhtwhile. That's one reason the Noyce Foundation is working to build a network of high-quality science experiences for young people outside of school, through 4-H, Techbridge, The After School Corporation (TASC), and others. Give kids a chance to do some real science or engineering, and they get interested, dig in, and learn.

When Mr. Rickleffs dissected the eggs

My sixth grade science teacher was named Mr. Rickleffs, and even though he was old, I had a crush on him. Partly it was the shirts he wore. They had bicolored thread so that looked at from one direction the shirt gleamed red, while from another direction it glimmered in green. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Mr. Rickleffs was dedicated to teaching science. Once he brought in an incubator and populated it with fertilized chicken eggs. Three times a week, we all gathered around while, carefully, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, he removed flakes of shell and let us glimpse the pulsating life within the egg membrane.

At first we tolerated this well enough, standing on chairs and peering down at a cluster of cells. But as the embryos developed winding blood vessels and giant staring eyes, we decided en masse that the whole project was gross. The girls especially took delight in squealing, covering our eyes, and saying, “Ew!!” And then one day Mr. Rickleffs lost his temper.

He turned around slowly, looking each of us in the eye. He told us in a terrible voice to stop being babyish. This was the miracle of life he was showing us. We were privileged to witness it.

I don’t know about the other kids, but the quiet passion of that rebuke knocked the foolishness right out of me. I stood up, shut up, leaned in, and paid attention. And years later, when I was in medical school dissecting a cadaver, I kept that thought close to me. I was privileged to be exploring the mysteries of life, and nothing about that privilege could ever be disgusting.

Where do Americans learn science?

American learn most of their science outside of school, argue John Falk and Lynn Dierking in a recent article in The American Scientist. Drawing on a number of lines of evidence, they argue that in thinking about science literacy, we foolishly ignore the impact of free-choice, informal learning.

They point out that while American elementary students perform well in tests of science knowledge compared to students from other countries, more schooling does not sustain that knowledge. By middle school, our students' knowledge looks mediocre, and by high school our students trail most of the world. Why, then, do American adults show better knowledge of basic science facts and concepts than adults in other places, including Western Europe, South Korea, and Japan? Since only about thirty percent of college students study science, and half the population doesn't attend college, it's clear that some important science learning is happening after most formal schooling in science has finished.

Falk and Dierking go on to make the case that what happens is informal, free-choice science. Adults take their kids to science museums, zoos, and nature centers. They garden, raise ornamental fish, or watch birds. Americans use public libraries, zoos and aquaria, natural history museums, and science museums more than do adults in other developed countries. American adults watch nature shows and Mythbusters, listen to Science Friday, search the Internet to understand their parents' medical symptoms, and read books about scientific topics or inventors that interest them. Some of them become amateur astronomers or build model rockets.

Preschool and elementary children, too, benefit from the riches of our out-of-school science learning environment. One interesting feature of science museums is how young many of the children in attendance appear to be. It's young children that parents bring to museums; by middle and high school, kids are too busy with sports, schoolwork, and friends to be traipsing off to the zoo with their parents. Shouldn't we take note that it's during this period, when school is their primary or even sole source of scientific information, that American students begin to lag their international peers?

To support science literacy, Falk and Dierking argue, we should avoid the error of assuming that science is learned only in school. We should continue to support the rich web of informal learning environments that pique the interest of citizens even when school is closed or finished. And that's one of the reasons the Noyce Foundation, in hopes of supporting a scientifically literate citizenry, continues to invest in informal and out-of-school science.

4-H Science

Do the words "4-H" conjure visions of kids with cows and baking contests? That was my vision five or six years ago, when the 4-H council began talking to the Noyce Foundation about their work in non-formal science education. It turns out that since the beginning, 4-H kids have been learning and sharing science, from animal science to food safety to the myriad projects they're involved in today: rocketry, geocaching, robotics, hydroponic gardening, monitoring water quality, wind power, and much more.

4-H is the largest youth organization in the country. They have an outreach agent in every county in the country, and each land grant university has a 4-H office that works on curriculum, coordination, and evaluation. Six million kids a year participate in 4-H clubs, camps, in-school and after-school programs. With a careful blend of youth development, mentoring, and content, 4-H prepares kids to be leaders in their communities. Longitudinal research confirms that the program increases positive outcomes for kids.

Now 4-H has taken on its Million Minds challenge. The goal is to get one million new kids involved in science programs, to engage them, improve their attitudes toward science and increase their knowledge, so that many more of them will choose science careers, from forestry to renewable energy to mechanical engineering.

At the national 4-H science leadership conference I just attended, I met state and county agents from all over the country working on curriculum, professional development plans for their volunteers, evaluation, and fund development. Asked to say a few words about why the Noyce Foundation supports 4-H science, I referred to five key strengths of 4-H: Their visionary and distributed leadership; their firm principles of positive youth development; their willingness to partner with other youth and science organizations; their unrivaled reach and scale; and the incredible dedication of their staff and volunteers.

There are a lot more 4-H graduates serving out there as leaders in our country than most of us realize. I just learned yesterday that Drew Faust, president of Harvard, raised large animals with 4-H as a girl. So to all of you involved in 4-H, now or in the past, I salute you. You do great work.