Catalyzing Scientific Inquiry and Engineering through Wearable Intersubjective Sensation Devices

该项目将研究如何提高年轻人的科学技能，并通过设计和制定一种新的科学教育方法，强调对动物感知和行为的好奇心和调查，提高他们对科学作为一个亲社会领域的看法。项目研究人员将调查中学生对家畜的好奇心、同情心和关心家畜的愿望如何激发科学探究和工程设计。为了支持这种学习，研究团队将开发新的可穿戴增强现实技术，通过允许访问不同动物物种的感官体验来增强人类感知。学生将根据他们的科学调查定制这些技术，并在随后的调查周期中使用它们作为工具。该项目将把科学教育与学生与家畜的日常互动联系起来，有可能扩大对科学和工程的参与，让那些认为自己喜欢动物但还不认为自己是科学家的学生参与。这项研究的参与者将主要是农村学校的学生，他们目前的STEM资源服务不足。 该研究团队将创造可穿戴和家庭安装的技术，使青少年和他们的家人能够通过收集有关动物活动的数据或使参与者能够像他们的家畜一样感知世界来研究动物行为和生物学。例如，狗主人可以进行实验，以确定他们的狗的听力频率范围，使用他们的发现来定制可穿戴耳罩，使自己只能听到这些范围，然后戴上这些耳罩，以便理解-并同情-他们的行为如何被这些感官体验塑造。科学探究也将是设计挑战的核心，例如设计和建造最大限度地吸引家畜的物体（例如，易于学习，参与的持续时间），然后使用科学的数据收集和分析方法来衡量不同设计的效果，使用评估结果来迭代改进它们。这项工作的智力价值将是探索新的可穿戴设备和增强现实技术的潜力，以促进主体间的感觉，激励，情境化和促进学生的科学和工程教育。这项工作将加深对个人相关主题如何激励科学和工程学习的了解，并产生关于关怀和同情如何与科学教育联系起来的基础实证研究结果。 这项工作的更广泛影响将是地方和国家的。在当地，60多名青年将通过参加项目活动学习科学和工程。至少4名教师也将参加，并通过这样做，了解新的教学方法，可以提高学生的学习。在全国范围内，其影响将是在学术出版物和免费课程中编写文件，说明方法及其对学生学习和动机的潜在影响。

This project will investigate how to improve young people's science skills, and to increase their perceptions of science as a pro-social field, through the design and enactment of a new science education approach that emphasizes curiosity about and investigation of animal perception and behavior. Project researchers will investigate how middle schoolers' curiosities about, empathy with, and desire to care for domestic animals can motivate scientific inquiry and engineering design. To support this learning, the research team will develop new wearable augmented reality technologies that enhance human perception by permitting access to the sensory experiences of different animal species. Students will customize these technologies based upon their scientific investigations, as well as use them as tools within subsequent investigative cycles. This project will connect science education to students' everyday interactions with domestic animals, potentially broadening participation in science and engineering to students who identify as being fond of animals but do not yet see themselves as scientists. The participants in this research will primarily be students in rural schools, who are underserved by current STEM resources. The research team will create wearable and home-installable technologies that enable youth and their families to investigate animal behavior and biology, either by collecting data about animal activity, or by enabling participants to sense the world as their domestic animals do. For instance, dog owners could conduct experiments to determine the frequency ranges of their dogs' hearing, use their findings to customize wearable earmuffs that enable themselves to hear only those ranges, and then wear those earmuffs in order to understand -- and empathize with -- how their behavior may be shaped by those sensory experiences. Scientific inquiry will also be central to design challenges, such as to design and build objects that maximally engage domestic animals (e.g., ease of learning, duration of engagement) and then use scientific data collection and analysis methods to measure how well different designs work, using evaluation outcomes to iteratively improve upon them. The intellectual merit of this work will be to explore the potential of the new, to-be-created genre of wearables and augmented reality technologies for intersubjective sensation, to motivate, contextualize, and facilitate students' science and engineering education. This work will deepen knowledge of how personally-relevant subject matter can motivate science and engineering learning, as well as generate foundational empirical findings about how care and empathy can be connected to science education. The broader impacts of this work will be both local and national. Locally, over 60 youth will learn about science and engineering through participation in project activities. At least 4 teachers will participate as well, and by doing so, learn about new teaching methods that could enhance their students' learning. Nationally, the impact will be to develop documentation, both in academic publications and in a free curriculum, that illustrates methods and their potential impacts on student learning and motivation.