Greetings from Twin Cities PBS and the Smithsonian Natural Museum of Natural History! We are excited to participate in the 2019 NSF STEM for All Video Showcase, and to share When Whales Walked: Journeys in Deep Time. This project (formerly titled Lineage) is a comprehensive educational media and outreach initiative that will engage families in learning about deep time and evolution, and will help audiences come to newfound understandings of the connections between the past, present, and future of life on Earth.

This multi-platform initiative centers around a two-hour documentary, When Whales Walked: Journeys in Deep Time, which premieres on PBS stations nationwide and is simulcast on the Smithsonian Network on June 19, 2019.  Additional project components include a virtual reality (VR) game which allows players to become virtual paleontologists; hands-on programming at the NMNH which features standards-aligned activities and a Family Fossil Festival; and a national outreach initiative which provides museum educators nationwide with the professional development and resources they need to integrate When Whales Walked into their institutions and communities. A robust research and evaluation project seeks to explore the strategic impacts of intergenerational co-play with physical vs virtual artifacts, and will inform ongoing innovation in the free choice learning space

Together, the project partners have co-designed a series of dynamic STEM learning experiences that harness the powerful reach of public media, leverage the Smithsonian's world-class collections and programming expertise, and capitalize on the power of immersive technologies. All project components work in concert to promote STEM learning and engagement, encourage scientific thinking and inquiry, and support family learning. We hope that When Whales Walked connects media-makers, thought leaders, educators, researchers and families, and look forward to your questions and comments!

I look forward to the series. I'm curious, what museum locations will be involved in the VR gaming and other resources? How will you be tracking the impact of those resources on learning?

Great video, I enjoyed seeing the animals and fossils in their natural environments. Could you provide some more information about the research and evaluation exploring how children and parents are using hands on activities and VR to learn about deep time?  Are these results influencing the products you are creating, or the workshops for informal educators?  Thanks!

The footage and stories for this documentary look great, a really interesting way to pull together some different aspects of paleontology and natural history into a unified story. It sounds like it is just about to launch next month, so I am looking forward to seeing it.

It would be helpful to hear more about the specific learning goals for the documentary and associated activities. What specific concepts are you focusing on, and how are they connected with what we know about gaps in public understanding? It sounds like there is a focus on "deep time" as one of the concept -- what do we know about how people understand this concept, what do we know about how to advance understanding, and what do we need to find out?

Thanks,
Billy

Building off of Amy's comment: 

 

Critical to this question about learning goals is sharing the target audiences, both public and professional, for the project. This includes general audiences of all ages who will watch the television broadcast on PBS, and families with children who will participate in the family learning activities at the exhibition (hands-on activities and Virtual Reality experience), as well Family Fossil Festivals. The project design also includes targeted outreach to rural populations who are underserved in science enrichment opportunities, and the museum professionals and other informal science educators with whom they work. However, in this response we focus on public audienes

 

Referring to the general audiences viewing the PBS program:

General audiences will increase their understanding of:

• Relevance of deep time to present time, and how Earth’s past, present, and future are connected through biological and geological processes.
• Evolution, extinction and/or ecosystem change over time as evidenced in the fossil record, and how these concepts are important in today’s changing world.
• Evolution as an incremental, non-linear process that generates the diversity of life.
• Scientific research as a process of asking questions, searching for answers, and thinking critically, with an emphasis on the methods of paleo-biology.
• Ways in which various scientific disciplines work together to illuminate understanding of Earth’s past and the evolutionary processes that have resulted in the species seen today.
• Complexities of speciation as evidenced through the lineages of the featured animals, and the fact that the extinction of a single species can represent the end of an entire lineage and an irreplaceable history many millions of years old.

 

The Lineage exhibition also provides a rich context in which to understand children and their caregivers’ abilities to understand concepts and scientific practices around paleontology, evolutionary thinking, and deep time. With regard to families who participate in the Lineage learning activities, children and their caregivers will be better able to

• Use science skills, such as observing, comparing, analyzing, inferring; and discussing challenging science-related topics, including how species evolve over time.
• Develop a positive identity with science such that they recognize its relevance to their own lives and feel motivated to seek out new science learning activities.
• Come to see their families as a learning unit and enjoy participating in learning activities together. Parents and caregivers specifically will feel more comfortable in their ability to support science learning at home, and see the value in learning together as a family. 

In terms of what we know about how people understand these concepts, what might help advance their understanding, and how learning activities such as a film, exhibition, etc. can be designed to support understanding, research demonstrates that evolution and deep time relationships are particularly challenging topics, even for adult museum visitors to natural history museums, who typically express more interest and awareness than the general public, in science in general, and paleontology, in particular (MacFadden B.J., Dunckel, B.A., Ellis, S., Dierking, L.D., Abraham-Silver, L. Kisiel, J. & Koke, J. 2007. Natural history museum visitors’ understanding of evolution. Bioscience, 57 (10: 875-882). In terms of deep time specifically, key points of misunderstanding include:

 

• Widespread difficulty understanding events or objects at scales that are very different from those they experience with their senses.
• People tend to have a poor understanding of large numbers, for example, not grasping the powers of 10, and the relationship among numbers such as 1, 1,000, and 1,000,000. People also struggle to distinguish between millions and billions.
• People are confused when attempting to understand the evidence of deep time provided by vertical geological strata, while also interpreting evolutionary events on a horizontal time line.
• Some religious beliefs promote views that are counter to the scientific concept of deep time. For example “Young Earth” creationists believe Earth is only a few thousand years old.

 

However, there is evidence that out of school experiences can be powerful and lead to new or

more developed understandings of scale, including an appreciation of deep time. Recommendations for making these concepts more accessible include:

• Introducing learners to both relative and absolute conceptions of deep time is important; that is, events in relation to each other on a time line, and the overall scale of geological time in millions of years.
• Understanding deep time is part of a wider cognitive development; the development of an understanding of scale. Learning experiences should move from the concrete to the abstract via a set of skills for comparison and relating items together.
• In order to understand the huge scale of deep time, learners need to identify reference points, ‘conceptual anchors’ in Earth’s history.

 

In terms of families, prior research suggests that museum learning experiences have the ability to support children’s recognition and articulation of natural selection and common decent (Evans & Lane, 2011; Evans et al., 2010; Legare, Lane, & Evans, 2013; Palmquist, Danter & Yalowitz, 2011). In addition, recently developed socially immersive media in the form of DeepTree collaborative table top exhibits has demonstrated the learning value of visualizing family trees in a dynamic interface (Davis et.al, 2016; Horn et.al. 2016). In particular, these findings suggest that the ability of technology to support visualization of how complex relationships between species change over time, is a powerful strategy to support evolutionary thinking. Research in museums has also suggested that learning is supported through conversations, joint attention, and physical engagement with elements in the learning environment (Crowley et.al, 2001; Eberbach and Crowley, 2005; Falk and Dierking, 2018).

 

The project's primary exhibition innovation is its exploration of new learning designs for families, including the use of cutting-edge technologies such as the VR experience and collaborative learning experiences that advance science knowledge and inquiry-based learning. The resulting research, which will investigate how intergenerational co-play between children and adults with physical hands-on experiences, compared to virtual artifacts, influences STEM learning and engagement, will lead to critical strategic impacts for the field, building knowledge about "what works," "why," and "how," informing ongoing innovation in the free choice learning space.

 

We would love to hear your thoughts, questions, and considerations as we move forward with this exciting project. 

Hi,

Great video - and thanks for the background about your research approach for this project.

I also appreciate the attention you give to training and professional learning opportunities for the staff of the museums that will participate in this initiative. You have picked some great partner organizations that can have direct reach to your target audience of rural and underserved families. How are you thinking about the continued support for these museum staff – both now and in future expansion? Are there formative assessment techniques that might be helpful for museum facilitators to mediate interactions they see in their spaces? Will the participating museum professionals continue to be connected as expansion continues?

Looking forward to learning more!

Margaret 

Greetings Margaret - Great question!  I'll let some of the other project partners share more about the specific plans for training and supporting the museum staff during the lifetime of this project and beyond, but I wanted to note that I share your appreciation for the project's goal of working with informal science ed professionals to broaden the reach of the resources and activities that are being developed--this outreach is a key factor of the project design that will hopefully lead to sustained impacts beyond the lifetime of the grant. 

The external evaluation team plans to gather feedback from museum/remote ISE facilitators following the initial training sessions and as they implement programming at remote sites. The goals of these evaluative efforts are to 1) ensure timely feedback to project stakeholders to keep them informed about ways they can best support remote facilitation efforts and 2) better understand the resulting impacts on these ISE professionals and the communities they serve. We will also gather feedback on what works well during the implementation phase and what, if anything, could be enhanced in future initiatives of this nature. I'm looking forward to the things we'll be able to learn and share out with the rest of the ISE community!

Hi There. No questions really! The film did a great job of answering all my question just as they emerged. Just want to say: beautiful video! I really enjoyed it.

great project - looking forward to more from the team

 

Great video and exciting project! Thank you.  I like many other geoscientists have long been flummoxed by the fact that, in spite of wonderful programming such as this, we are plagued by low enrollments and a general lack of understanding about what kinds of jobs are available to people in this STEM realm.  Are there ways to gauge the impact that your project might have on the educational trajectories of middle and high school students?  Our STEMSEAS project aims to get early-stage STEM-interested students out to sea to discover previously unknown futures, but I am also keenly interested in interventions that might tackle the pipeline disconnect upstream.