Visitors to public science festivals have a tremendous amount of free choice to decide how to navigate through the festival, as well as when, where, and how long to stop at an exhibit. This study examines how elementary-aged children individually or collaboratively engaged with festival exhibits at a public science festival in St. Petersburg,…

Although efforts have been made in the United States to increase diversity within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, the Latino population is still largely underrepresented. This novel study focused on Latino underrepresentation by exploring Latino parents' attitudes toward science. We organized 15 family science…

Purpose: Invasive species are under the spotlight because of their detrimental effects on biodiversity. However, management of invasions presents multiple dimensions frequently difficult to disentangle. This complex topic has been tackled through a service-learning project on an invasive insect ("Vespa velutina"), a bee-eating species…

Founded in 2011, the Bay Area Science Festival (BASF), led by the Science and Health Education Partnership (SEP) at UC San Francisco, brings together academic, scientific, corporate and civic groups to develop and lead STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) events for all ages. From 2011-2019, the Festival hosted over 50 events…

The main goal for Science Recreation Workshops (SRWs) is to build communities that create meaningful experiences, while participants engage with science in a practical manner. This triggers processes where acting and knowing go hand-in-hand to involve each person as a whole. This requires physical, intellectual and emotional interaction to…

Diversity has been shown to improve the ability of groups to problem solve and make predictions, as well as guarding against groupthink and overconfidence. Marginalized groups within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields are still largely underrepresented despite various efforts to increase diversity in STEM. This…

Science festivals are seen as a success story for public engagement with science, with numbers rapidly growing. However, research has shown that attendees at such events tend to be more affluent, better-educated and more interested in science than populations at large. This has led to calls for research into how festivals can widen participation…

Bilingual and multilingual speakers mix two or more languages for communication, gaining information and sense-making in varieties of contexts. How do bilinguals mix languages and what does the mixing afford for their learning and participation? This study examines these questions, focusing on Korean-English bilingual youths in a community-based…

Children in low-income neighbourhoods experience an intersection of socio-structural factors that delimit their engagement with out-of-school (informal) science education. Using Bourdieu's framework of habitus, this paper explores how informal science educators and children in a given low-income community in western Canada described the attitudes,…

Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among teachers, students, and families. The term "citizen scientist" has various definitions. It can refer to those who gather information for a particular science research study or to people who lobby for environmental protection for their communities. "Citizen science" has been called…

In this article, I explore what happens when digital media activities designed to stimulate science conversations are introduced to an out-of-school-time (OST) space usually reserved for talks about girls' issues. The goals of this study were to provide a space that values youth voice and creates positive emotional energy around science-related…

The Community Science Workshops (CSWs)--with funding from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation--created a network among the CSW sites in California. The goals of the CSW Network project have been to improve programs, build capacity throughout the Network, and establish new sites. Inverness Research has been…

This module provides a set of quantitative snapshots of the Community Science Workshops (CSWs) to complement the other reports that comprise the CSW Evaluation Portfolio--the Description of CSWs, the Benefits to Youth, and the Evaluation Brief modules--and to build a solid representation of the scope and scale of the CSW's work and…

This paper takes a descriptive look at Community Science Workshops (CSWs). This paper discusses what CSW is, how it arose and spread, how local CSWs are structured and led, and what programs and experiences they offer to youth. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

This curriculum guide is designed for educators who want to teach youths aged 5-18 about the interactions among energy, economics, and the environment. This guide contains five chapters of activities, each focusing on a different topic related to this interaction as well as several sections that guide session leaders in helping youth along the…