Board gaming is a popular activity, growing despite all the pressures of digitalization. People are gathering to play socially. Besides this ludic movement, modern board games can be used directly or adapted to achieve other goals beyond entertainment, approaching serious game methods as a modding exercise. This paper describes a process where a…

Democracy is a process, one that needs to be continually renewed to fit new experiences and new circumstances; in other words, it's a process of education. The enrichment of experience through education is a task that must be carried on every day, in both formal and informal settings.

All professionals face similar problems based on the nature of their work. For example, teachers, hair stylists, chefs, and physicians might appear to have nothing in common, but they must all get better at completing the tasks they are performing. They must all communicate effectively with others and encounter challenges in their work that they…

There is an international trend towards fun, irreverent, and social events that feature scientific themes and content. We argue that these events -- what we call Adult Science Entertainment Events, or ASEEs -- are a distinct phenomenon in science education and science communication, deserving of study in their own right. In addition to their…

The majority of research concerning science communication happens in spaces where people already have a vested interest in or knowledge of science, such as museums and science cafes. Thus, there is a gap in understanding what theory-based science communication looks like in non-science-centered spaces. This qualitative research study, which…

Learning and personal development are integral to being a person, and learning and teaching are integral to life as a social being. "Understanding Children's Informal Learning" presents children's informal learning out-of-school and explores how this knowledge can enhance teaching and learning practice in the classroom. The authors focus…

Social media has been recognized as a promising online communication environment that supports self-directed informal learning activities outside educational institutions. Development of metacognition is necessary for self-directed learning. Nevertheless, most studies have focused on the use of social media for formal learning. To fill this gap,…

Latinxs have a long history of participation in basketball, yet links to education scholarship are for the most part non-existent. In a context of ongoing subtractive policies around curriculum, teaching, toxic immigration policies and other sociopolitical realities, Latinxs have long used "hoops" as a space for identity formation,…

Despite communities of practice (COPs) literature asserting the importance of attending to power dynamics within these learning contexts, research has largely ignored the process of racialization within COPs and, in particular, the role anti-racist pedagogies play within these spaces. In response, I present findings from an instrumental case study…

Over the last decade or so, the rate of growth of academic publications involving discussion of 'citizen science' and 'community science', and similar variants, has risen exponentially. These fluid terms, with no fixed definition, cover a continuum of public participation within a range of scientific activities. It is, therefore, apposite and…

We investigated what students learnt about biodiversity, a broad and multi-dimensional concept, challenging to understand, following a visit to a nature reserve. Acknowledging the individual nature of informal learning, we explore Personal Meaning Maps (PMMs) coupled with semi-structured interviews to investigate learning among 13 scouts aged…

In prior research, museum attendance has been shown to positively impact educational outcomes for children, teens, and adults, yet little has been documented about who is attending and how often. This paper is the first to provide comprehensive descriptive and regression analyses to explore museum attendance among youth (5 to 18 year-olds) in the…

Carefully designed evaluations of informal science events are key to gaining insights into their efficacy and impact on audiences. However, traditional approaches to evaluation, such as interviews and questionnaires, can be disruptive to the audience experience of science events. There is therefore a need to develop and implement new evaluation…

Although programming is often learned through formal instruction or self-paced tutorials, informal learning, for example, through publicly available online documentation, is also a significant resource for skill development among novices. However, many novices struggle to extract useful information from documentation. This work aims to answer two…

While formal, digital-technology-based professional development for higher education faculty has been extensively studied, informal and incidental learning (IIL) within this area remain underexplored. Integrating the Broaden-and-Build Theory with the Informal and Incidental Learning framework, this study examines how positive emotions influence…