InqBlot

We just released our first iPhone App: A conference guide to the upcoming International Conference of the Learning Sciences in Chicago.

It’s available directly from the App store. Just search on ‘icls’.

You can also visit our ICLS App web page.

It has all the features you’d expect from a conference app:

• program guide
• maps
• a way to favorite sessions
• search

And a few nifty features:

• Off-line browsing — Set your conference schedule on the airplane! No network necessary.
• Abstracts — Even if you’re not going to the conference, you might find it interesting to browse the app to see what’s being presented. Where available, we have included abstracts.
• Social Media — Easy links to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Use #icls to add your update to the stream!

We developed it in close coordination with the conference organizers, so it’s about as up to date and accurate as you can possibly get. (The program is actually still being updated as I type, so we hope to get in one round of updates before the conference.)

If all goes well, we’ll set our sights on AERA 2011!

We at Inquirium are thrilled to be involved in a just-awarded $19 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The core of this 5-year project is to find ways to help students ages 11-18 develop better literacy skills by supporting claims with evidence — also known as evidence-based reasoning.

The grant is motivated by the ever-increasing need for young readers to be able to integrate, analyze, and interpret information from multiple sources and disciplines (think: research via the web).

The official grant title is Reading for Understanding Across Grades 6-12: Evidence-Based Argumentation for Disciplinary Learning. It involves basic research, the design of new educational resources, and evaluation. Inquirium’s role is to create software tools that support and motivate students during evidence-based argumentation tasks.

We join a talented multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University and WestEd, as well as practitioners from Chicago Public Schools and the San Francisco Unified and Oakland Unified School Districts, among others. Can’t wait to get started!

UPDATE 1: The Department of Ed officially announced the awards here.

UPDATE 2: Northwestern University’s School of Ed posted this nice press release mentioning our role.

What I like most about my job are the opportunities we get to create learning environments that are relevant.  So I’m always pleased when I come across a news story on a topic related to one of our projects.  This morning, while driving the kids to school, I had the opportunity to hear two such stories on NPR.

The first story was about a program to address bullying in a Maryland school. The program targets “the circle of bulying,” helping kids understand that bullying can involve a host of roles: passive supporters, followers, the bully, the victim, and possible defenders. This was one of the primary aims of the “Take a Stand” interactive exhibit we created for the Illinois Holocaust and Education Center. This physically immersive game-like social simulation gives kids the opportunity to choose whether they want to be bystanders, supporters, followers or defenders. While bullying was just one of the “universal lessons” of the holocaust we targetted, it certainly is the one that resonates most with the exhibit’s largely middle school audience.

The second story was about a fossilized pinky found in Siberia that points to a previously unknown human ancestor– a hominid that’s neither Homo Sapiens nor Neanderthal. The story documented the new questions raised by this find, as scientists grapple to reshuffle their understanding of human ancestry.  This was the goal of “Bones of Contention” an online interactive activity for high schoolers we recently created for WGBH/NOVA. Like the story, the activity and web-based software we created encourages students to explore the callenges scientist face when classifying hominid fossils. By investigating a database full of unlableled hominid fossils, students take part in the ongoing scientific process of discovering human origins.

I also frequently come across news related to the work we did a few years back for the My World GIS project, using current geospatial data on the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet in a classroom climate change activity (scroll midway down the page) that studies the risks posed by decreasing salinity levels in the North Atlantic on the climate of Europe. Let’s hope the news on that one changes for the better!

WGBH/NOVA approached us to build two web interactives on the topic of evolution to go with their new PBS television shows. They were specifically looking for data-driven investigations. “Great!” we thought. We’ve done web interactives! We’ve done evolution! And no one does data-driven investigations like we do! Where’s the catch?

Oh, you want it done in 3 months?

Both of them?

After a very frantic 3 months, we are happy to announce the launch of Inquirium’s latest creations, a pair of web-based investigation tools for teaching high school students about evolution.

On the surface, these interactives look like just another database and animated diagram. But we’ve designed the interactives around an activity context which draws students into data-driven investigations.

• “Bones of Contention“ has students playing the role of a physical anthropologist trying to identify and classify “mystery” fossils using a database of most of the significant hominid fossil finds.
• “Regulating Genes“ introduces students to the evolutionary processes at work during development (and technically, at conception) by having them explore how mutations in both coding and non-coding areas of genes lead to different morphological features in a fictional creature.

Cramming what could easily have been two year-long research and development projects into a single 3-month timeframe was an interesting challenge. We sharpened our teeth building similar software for longer term grant-funded projects, which afforded more opportunity for background research, formative evaluation, and design iteration. For this project, we had to adapt our design process to fit a new sort of timeline, forcing us to commit to certain design decisions very early in the process and leaving very little wiggle room to explore emergent ideas. There’s nothing like a short timeframe to make us reflect on our design process and pare down our cycles only to the bare essentials.

While the interactives are simple by necessity and by design (both are scoped to work within 1-2 class periods), they draw upon models of inquiry and investigation that, unfortunately, still do not see much light beyond the realm of academic research and school reform projects. Kudos to NOVA for bringing this approach to a wider audience.

Both tools were created to accompany NOVA episodes commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species. One episode, “Becoming Human,” explores human origins, and the other one, “What Darwin Never Knew,” explores the emerging science of evo-devo.

We conceived, designed, and produced both tools. We also created a complete set of classroom materials that include background essays, student worksheets, and teacher guides.

Time Out Chicago highlighted the Miller Family Youth Exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in its list of 8 Highlights of 2009 for Chicago Families.  Inquirium’s Take a Stand exhibit occupies 30% of the exhibition, using virtual reality technology to provide kids with an immersive social experience in which they encounter the challenges and rewards of standing up for others and taking action to benefit society.

The IL Holocaust Museum dedicated their youth space this last weekend. We finally got a bit more coverage than we had in the past by the Pioneer Press. An excerpt:

“So here on a Sunday afternoon were the invited guests to the dedication, many of whom brought children and grandchildren to experience the offerings in this unique space. State-of-the-art technology is reflected in familiar computer screens as well as a not-so-familiar movie theater-size screen in a separate room. The all-enveloping screen is a part of an exercise that allows children to take on the role of frogs and make important decisions along their journey.

Still, even with technology that would rival the best of Nintendo and X-Box games, it would be a serious mistake to suggest that the exhibit serves simply as another venue for children to play with computer toys.

“The space we’re dedicating today is not a game room,” Harvey Miller said. “It is not a demonstration of the latest computer graphics. It is not a space for relaxation and resting. It is a teaching experience. It is meant to help provide the skills that parents, teachers, caregivers and the children themselves need in order to understand and use the lessons of the Holocaust. “

So it’s great to hear that our technology wowed the reporter. But I’m really glad Harvey Miller (the donor) was there to set the record straight.

The exhibit is admittedly hard to pin down in words.  Even docents can have a hard time with it. On the surface, it looks and feels like a video game: you control characters on a screen, you have some goal that you’re trying to achieve in the space (catching flies), and you have a score that tells you how well you’re doing.  But our goal was to deliberately use people’s expectations against them.  And not so much “teach” per se, but to provide a touchstone experience that could spark conversations about the universal lessons of the holocaust.

Now that the exhibit is open and I have a little more time, I hope to spend the next few weeks relaying some design stories from our experience.