The Circuit: A Platform for Increasing Access to, Deepening and Researching patterns of Family and Adult Participation in Informal Science

作为加强非正式环境学习总体战略的一部分，推进非正式STEM学习（AISL）项目为各种环境中使用的创新资源提供资金。该项目将研究和开发Circuit，这是一款移动电话和基于网络的应用程序，将使家庭和公众能够发现大多数社区存在的广泛的非正式科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）机会。这些非正式的STEM资源包括科学和儿童博物馆、科学和计算机营、创客空间、课后项目、公民科学等等。目前还没有“一站式”搜索这些资源。相反，参与者必须进行多次低效的互联网搜索，以找到所需的STEM资源。该电路将使用户能够有效地搜索丰富的非正式STEM数据库，根据位置、地理、年龄水平、科学学科、项目类型和其他因素识别资源。该电路建立在SciStarter的基础上，后者是一个现有的在线平台，将成千上万的潜在和活跃的公民科学家与公民科学项目联系起来。SciStarter使收集和组织数千个公民科学项目成为可能，否则这些项目将分散在网络上。该电路将以SciStarter在公民科学领域的技术成就为基础，同时系统地涵盖已建立的国家网络的产品。通过整合现有的非正式STEM资源网络，该应用程序将为公众提供无与伦比的非正式STEM机会，同时收集数据，揭示参与模式，以了解不同类型STEM体验之间的影响因素。该应用程序将为研究人员提供新的机会，研究家庭和成年人如何参与其社区非正式STEM资源的生态系统。该电路将开发网络工具，从可信的、目前孤立的、非正式的STEM内容提供商网络中聚合和组织数字内容。这些机构包括科学节、科学和儿童博物馆、美国科学促进会（AAAS）和最大的大众科学出版物《发现》杂志（拥有300万读者）。每个内容合作伙伴将直接或通过其会员向应用程序提供信息，并鼓励在各自的社区中采用the Circuit。该项目将设计数字工具，包括用于获取和共享数字内容的api（应用程序编程接口），用于记录和分析跨领域移动、参与度和持久性数据的可嵌入工具，以及用于分发、跟踪和分析内容、参与度和人口统计数据的社交媒体工具和相关api。（API是一种允许两个软件程序相互通信的代码。）该项目将进行小规模的行为证明研究，以测试该平台的可行性，以支持未来独立的全面研究。我们将与合作伙伴、研究人员和评估人员一起设计和测试一个分析仪表板，以确保访问模式、点击、推荐、搜索、“加入”、书签、分享、贡献、用户位置、持久性等数据在域内和跨域访问。由于每个合作伙伴将把他们的分析结果提供给共享的仪表板，这将为推进非正式STEM学习的研究提供前所未有的、急需的数据。该电路将允许跟踪跨网络和项目的参与模式。对来自The Circuit最终用户的行为数据进行匿名分析，将通过展示非正式STEM领域的参与模式，支持新方法，以证据为基础推进对相互关联的非正式STEM学习的理解。通过公众志愿者的参与，Circuit将探索系统中参与者的地理和人口模式，并为自己和未来的努力提供重要的设计经验，以创建非正式环境中STEM教育的互联学习策划系统。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. The project will research and develop the Circuit, a mobile phone and web-based application that will empower families and the general public to discover the broad spectrum of informal Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) opportunities that exist in most communities. These informal STEM resources include science and children's museums, science and computer camps, maker spaces, afterschool programs, citizen science and much more. There is currently no "one-stop" searching for these resources. Instead, participants must conduct multiple, inefficient Internet searches to find the sought for STEM resources. The Circuit will enable users to efficiently search a rich informal STEM database, identifying resources by location, geography, age levels, science discipline, type of program and other factors. The Circuit builds on SciStarter, an existing online platform that connects thousands of prospective and active citizen scientists to citizen science projects. SciStarter has made possible the collection and organization of several thousand citizen science projects that would otherwise be scattered across the web. The Circuit will build on SciStarter's technical achievements in the citizen science sector, while systematically encompassing the offerings of established national networks. By integrating existing networks of informal STEM resources, the app will afford the public with unrivaled access to informal STEM opportunities, while collecting data that reveals patterns of engagement towards understanding factors of influence between different types of STEM experiences. The app will provide researchers with new opportunities for researching how families and adults participate in the ecosystem of informal STEM resources in their communities. The Circuit will develop web tools to aggregate and organize digital content from trusted, currently siloed, informal STEM networks of content providers. These include science festivals, science and children's museums, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Discover Magazine (3 million readers), the largest general interest science publication. Each content partner will feed the app with information directly or through their membership and encourage adoption of The Circuit within their respective communities. The project will design digital tools, including APIs (application program interfaces) to acquire and share digital content, embeddable tools to record and analyze data about movement, engagement, and persistence across domains, and social media tools and related APIs to distribute, track, and analyze content, engagement and demographics. (An API is a code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other.) The project will conduct small-scale, proof-of-conduct studies, to test the viability of the platform to support future, independent full-scale research. An analytics dashboard will be designed and tested with partners, researchers, and evaluators to ensure access to data on patterns of visits, clicks, referrals, searches, "joins," bookmarks, shares, contributions, user-locations, persistence, and more, within and across domains. Because each partner will feed their analytics into the shared dashboard, this will provide unprecedented and much-needed data to advance research in informal STEM learning. The Circuit will allow the tracking of patterns of engagement across networks and programs. Anonymized analytics of behavioral data from end users of The Circuit will support new approaches to advance evidence-based understanding of connected informal STEM learning by exhibiting engagement patterns across informal STEM domains. Through volunteer participation by the public, the Circuit will explore the geographic and demographic patterns of participants in the system, and derive important design lessons for its own and future efforts to create curated systems of connected learning across STEM education in informal settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.