Advancing Children’s Science Learning through Community Co-Design of AI-Enhanced Bilingual E-Books (ACCESS)
Presenter(s): Aria Gaston-Panthaki, Viviana Velez Negron
Session slides/materials: Concurrent session-AGaston
This session will be organized into three connected components. First, we will provide an overview of the project’s goals, research process, and emerging findings (~20 minutes) to situate participants in the broader context of ACCESS and our community-centered design approach. Next, we will showcase one of the interactive e-books on our platform, offering a live demonstration and inviting attendees to explore it using pre-created test accounts (~15 minutes). This hands-on portion will allow participants to navigate the digital environment themselves and offer real-time reactions to the design, functionality, and user experience.
Following the demo, we will open a guided conversation (~10 minutes) where participants can reflect on their experience, raise questions, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of integrating AI tools into informal STEM learning materials. We will encourage feedback that can inform future iterations of the platform and support its eventual scaling and dissemination. Throughout the session, attendees will have multiple entry points to engage—through listening, interacting with the technology, and contributing to a collective discussion about designing AI-supported children’s e-books in culturally responsive ways.
Building Supports Towards a Useful, Usable, and In-Use Framework of Professional Competencies in the Informal STEM Learning Field
Presenter(s): Donnelley Hayde (she/her), Amanda Fisher
Session slides/materials: Concurrent session-DHayde
Presenters will provide an overview of the project through the lens of change management. This presentation will include discussion of the project’s goals and procedures, how collaborators were involved, what resulted from the project, and how we measured and described success, framed in terms of general principles that others can use in their own projects. Given the virtual format, we expect to leverage chat functions and other engagement tools throughout the presentation as the conference platform permits.
Stories from the Field: Community- Driven Inquiry in Failure-Rich Making Spaces
Presenter(s): Amber Simpson, Jonathan Bijur
After a brief introduction, Rediscover and MOSAC will share the story of their research journeys, as well as describe how collaboration with fellow informal educators and the research team shaped their process. At the start of the session, participants will receive a resource document outlining the approaches and tools used to guide this work. They can follow along during the presentations or simply explore it afterward. We will conclude by inviting participants to reflect on how these resources might apply to a challenge or “problem” in their own setting and to engage in dialogue with our community partners through questions and discussion.
Developing a new generation of collaborative scientists and citizens through popular media
Presenter(s): Sara Sweetman, Lisa Jones, Laura Goldstein
Session slides/materials: Concurrent session-SSweetman
Participants will engage in an interactive, virtual session that blends research, media, and assessment experiences. The session will begin with a concise, (under 10 minutes) overview of the background research, framing children’s perceptions of scientists, gender representation, and collaborative practices in STEM. Participants will then view a six-minute video featuring animated Ari the Bat from Elinor Wonders Why in conversation with practicing scientist Dr. Desiree Forsythe. As the two discuss who is included in science, Ari reflects on flashback moments from grant-developed episodes that model collaboration, inclusion, and shared problem-solving. Following the video, participants will interact with the project’s gamified digital assessment, allowing them to experience firsthand how the project is measuring perceptions of scientists and affinity for collaboration. The session will conclude with a facilitated six-minute discussion supported by a digital whiteboard, where participants will reflect on their assessment experience and collaboratively surface challenges and opportunities associated with measuring people’s willingness to collaborate and their understanding of the benefits of diverse collaboration in STEM contexts.
Developing Conversational Videos to Support Children’s STEM Learning and Engagement
Presenter(s): Jasmine Tran
The concurrent session will consist of the following: 1) a presentation overview of past and current research (~20 minutes), 2) a demo of the interactive video-watching web app with opportunities for feedback (~15 minutes), and 3) a discussion of the research (~10 minutes). Using the test accounts we will create before the session, participants can try out the web app developed for the home study during our session. We will also encourage feedback on the design as participants interact with the app to improve the overall user experience for future scale-up and dissemination. Additionally, we will facilitate a discussion at the end of the session for participants to share their experiences and thoughts about AI-integrated STEM learning.
Developing resources to support community-responsive family program evaluation in informal STEM learning institutions
Presenter(s): Diana Ballesteros, Franklin Aucapina, Delia Meza
Participants will view co-design artifacts and hear short audio/video reflections recorded by our community co-designers. These artifacts illustrate how families experience STEM learning beyond program offerings/museum settings. The session will include facilitated reflections and discussions, including a dialogue in which attendees consider how stories can inform their own contexts. We will share how caregiver stories are helping to directly shape evaluation tool prototypes, modeling a co-design process that can be replicated across institutions.
Informal Biodiversity Education Models for Rural and Tribal Youth
Presenter(s): Erica DeFrain, Patrciai Wonch Hill, Josie Semroska
Together with the youth services librarian and the library director from one of our rural partner libraries, we will share how we collaboratively designed, implemented, and are evaluating a series of 15 dynamic, biodiversity-themed youth programs.
Our presentation will highlight how the library team selected and integrated biodiversity-focused books and resources – purchased with project funds – into each program to build background knowledge, spark curiosity, and support sustained engagement with biodiversity concepts. We will describe how the library partnered with local educators, naturalists, and community knowledge-holders to enrich the programming and offer multiple entry points into STEM learning for young people.
We will discuss the strategies for planning and delivering the programs, including how the library team incorporated culturally relevant examples, leveraged both indoor and outdoor learning spaces, and adapted activities to meet the needs and interests of youth in their community. We will also share what we are learning about building relationships and collaborating with rural and Tribal libraries to empower youth as environmental stewards and create equitable access to informal STEM learning opportunities in their communities.
Throughout the session, we will emphasize the collaborative nature of this work, specifically how co-creation between researchers, librarians, and community partners shape program design and strengthen local ownership. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for building similar partnerships, integrating biodiversity education into youth services, and designing inclusive STEM experiences that honor community knowledge and help all participants feel they belong.
Accessible Informal STEM Learning Experiences (ISE) with All Audiences, including Neurodivergent Audiences
Presenter(s): Kelly Riedinger, Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki, Susan Letourneau, Wendy Martin, Sam Tumolo, Zac Alstad, Grayson Ponti
Session slides/materials: Concurrent session-KRiedinger
Our session will begin with a short overview of each project represented by the collaborators (who represent researchers and community partners) in the session. Then, we will facilitate table discussions where participants will be invited to share stories from their projects around accessibility and community engagement, with a particular focus on data-driven stories (findings) and working with neurodivergent individuals/communities. After tables have time to share about their projects, the session collaborators will facilitate an engagement activity designed to synthesize key ideas across projects and identify gaps where future work is needed. We will conclude the session with a whole group share-out and session conclusion.
Smart Science Exhibits: Enhancing STEM Learning through Sustained use of Mixed-Reality in Multiple Informal Learning Spaces
Presenter(s): Nesra Yannier
The session will involve data-driven storytelling, videos of excited children and adults learning with AI-enhanced mixed reality exhibits, and audience participation in scientific prediction and explanation.
We will describe AI-enhanced exhibits that improve learning, engagement and scientific conversations in museums and after school programs. We will showcase our NoRILLA intelligent science exhibits which add an AI layer on top of hands-on experimentation and have been shown to improve children’s learning of scientific and engineering concepts compared to standard hands-on exhibits without the AI layer, while also increasing dwell-time. The presentation will include videos of excited children learning with NoRILLA (you can see videos at norilla.org) as well as interesting and challenging prediction tasks for participants to engage in scientific reasoning about learning and about physics!
The data behind our story comes from multiple published experiments with NoRILLA intelligent exhibits (Yannier et al. 2024; Yannier et al. 2022; Yannier et al. 2021; Yannier et al. 2020). These experiments have demonstrated the impact of crucial design features bridging physical and interactive elements. NoRILLA’s combination of research-based scientific inquiry activities and open-ended engineering projects produces 10x greater learning improvement than equivalent time spent just on open-ended engineering projects (Yannier et al. 2020). NoRILLA’s AI guidance produces greater visitor learning, greater visitor engagement (4X longer dwell time at the exhibit), and fosters better scientific conversations between children and caregivers than an otherwise equivalent exhibit without AI guidance (Yannier et al. 2022). NoRILLA’s AI-based adaptive selection of inquiry tasks based on visitor performance produces greater learning outcomes than a random sequence of tasks (Yannier et al., 2024).
STEM Education Organizational Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Collaborative Research in Informal STEM Learning Environments
Presenter(s): Katherine McMillan Culp, Susan Letourneau, Phebe Chew, Katherine Ziff
This 60-minute session will highlight how NYSCI has sought to support collaborative research through sustained, intentional planning and practices at the institutional level, cross-departmental relationships and practices, and through the planning and conduct of specific research studies. Fellows’ presentations of their work will describe how the experience of pursuing this research revealed the critical roles these structural and cultural supports to inquiry played, as well as challenges encountered. It will also highlight how the fellows have become members of, and actors within, the institution’s department and culture and the value that they have brought to the institution. Through the fellows’ narratives regarding their own studies and the impact of those studies on practice, we hope to demonstrate the distinctive roles that non-traditional institutional settings can play as sites for ambitious, embedded, and in-depth collaboration during early career research training experiences. Throughout the session, speakers will link their presentations to opportunities and obstacles that session participants may be encountering in their own efforts to carry out productive research-practice partnerships of various kinds.
Technology Integration in a Native Education Program
Presenter(s): Breanne Litts, Tifiny Mills, Dallas Haws, Christina Morgan
We shared our work with the local community through a Native Film Festival event and we hope to employ a similar interactive program for our AISL community. This will include our entire team: Native educators, youth creators, and university researchers. We will structure the session with a host, explanation of our community driven research process, detail of our design and implementation of the learning experience, and then youth from the program presenting their own projects to the community. At the conclusion, we will invite discussion and idea sharing among participants to also learn from community members with similar projects.
Utilizing the Library System and Virtual Reality Learning Experiences To Engage Rural and LatinX Communities in Polar Research
Presenter(s): Monae Verbeke, Kevin Ponto
This session will blend research findings, design examples, and facilitated discussion.
First we will explore brief demonstrations and visual walkthroughs from PolarVR games, examine how embodiment, agency, and narrative structure influence learner outcomes such as empathy, curiosity, and scientific attitudes. We hope to then engage listeners in structured small-group conversations to connect the research findings to their own informal learning environments (e.g., museums, libraries, community programs). Followed by a discussion of the practical implications for implementation, including facilitation models, accessibility considerations, and evaluation strategies for VR learning games in ISL settings.
The session will emphasize how dialogue between researchers and practitioners (librarians), has created space to interrogate both the opportunities and challenges of VR for informal learning and community outreach.