PI Stephen Alkins will greet conference attendees, give a brief overview of the schedule, and provide norms setting for engagement during the conference. He will be joined by Dr. Monya A. Ruffin, NSF Deputy Directorate Head of the STEM Education Research and Innovation Directorate for STEM Education (EDU), who will give opening remarks.

AISL projects, across museums, community STEM programs, media, PPSR projects, and research–practice partnerships, play a foundational role in shaping how people learn, engage with, and feel belonging in STEM. Yet communicating the purpose, values, and impact of this work can be challenging. Conveying the meaning and stakes of informal STEM learning requires more than information. It requires story.

Developed specifically for REVISE’s AISL awardee community, this workshop supports participants in using storytelling to illuminate the “why” of their project, strengthen partnerships, and communicate impact in ways that honor community knowledge and diverse ways of knowing.

Drawing from arts-based and narrative traditions, we explore how stories help us:

• bridge everyday experiences with what’s at stake for STEM learning
• gather people around shared goals
• broaden participation and belonging
• communicate project impact to partners, funders, and public audiences

Because informal STEM learning is fundamentally relational, this workshop uses improv-inspired interactive exercises, story frameworks, and dialogic reflection practices to help AISL awardees bring their project stories to life. Participants will experiment with storytelling in real time, practicing the creativity, collaborative sense-making, and vulnerability needed to communicate program impacts.

By telling stories, our impact becomes clearer, deeper, and more rooted in the communities we serve.

This keynote frames The ILLEST Lab as a living design praxis that extends into children’s media. In West Philadelphia, play, computational making, and storytelling function as culturally grounded practices that build homeplace. Grounded in Welcome Home: Positive Affective Cultural Experiences (Edouard, 2026, Science Education), I argue that STEAM media is more than content production. It is relational community care, using narrative as communal expression and learning.

Through the Animation Lab, Sneaker Lab, and the GRIND initiative, I center students of West Philly as designers, storytellers, and technologists. Their experiences sharpen the stakes of engagement in STEAM. Positive Affective Cultural Experiences (PACE) examines how collaborative creation reshapes learning environments and expands representation, identity, and possibility. That same design vision extends into my Children’s media work. As Executive Producer of MayNERD’s Wild World of Science and Built From Scratch, and Creative Producer on the PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats! I use the media as infrastructure for belonging. Across the lab and screen, the work remains the same: build ecosystems where presence, imagination, and technical skill grow together.

Edouard, K. (2026). Welcome home: Positive affective cultural experiences and the proleptic promise of belonging in informal STEM with Black boys. Science Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.70057

The presenters will provide an overview of informal science education networks, associations, and repositories that are essential to the broader informal science education field and to improving the quality of informal STEM learning. They will highlight how these resources support the sharing of expertise, the development of effective public engagement methods and practices, capacity building, professional learning for informal educators and scientists, and the amplification of impact at scale. Collectively, these efforts can increase science literacy and strengthen public trust in and engagement with science.

Story Telling Panel: NASA PATHS Storytelling Project- Reflections from Participants

From 2022 to 2024, the NASA PATHS Storytelling Program worked closely each year with students and young professionals to document and disseminate their STEM stories. In this panel, attendees will view excerpts of selected videos (in our library collection of a total of 26 stories) and engage in a conversation with the program’s lead faculty and a participant. Attendees will gain deep and moving insights in relation to STEM education, careers, and family or community contexts, and are invited to discuss the storytelling model with the speakers.

This panel explores how informal science education can spark interest and build foundational skills in quantum information science, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, three priority areas for the National Science Foundation. Panelists will highlight research-driven informal learning models that cultivate curiosity, computational thinking, and problem-solving skills that support future innovation.

Panelists include:

• Diana Franklin from Quander 2.0: Fostering a QIS Learning Ecosystem for Middle Schoolers through Informal Educator Professional Development, an Online Game, and Offline Play
• Pengyu Hong from Collaborative Research: Cultivating Tomorrow’s Innovators Through Exploring Planetary Images with Artificial Intelligence
• Jose Agosto Rivera from Collaborative Research: Arecibo C3 – Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement

NSF Program Directors Dr. Alicia Santiago and Dr. Kevin Clark will host an open question-and-answer forum for meeting participants.