Connecting the Pieces

Today, we worked on the connections between the major parts of our project we hope to entice campers to engage with: camp, puzzle, Citizen Science, and a community organization in Pittsburgh. Next, we talked a little about how to engage 11–13 year olds with our puzzle. For the final half hour, we were fortunate to talk with Mr. Patrick McShea and Ms. Laurie Giarratani about content that could drive the storyline of the puzzle.

Connecting the Major Parts of the Puzzle

In order to connect the major parts of our project, we started by asking what they have in common. A common thread among these aspects is an emphasis on applying skills that the 11–13 year olds use in camp: observation, identification, analyzing tests, and using deductive logic. The primary goal of the four parts is to increase their appreciation and awareness for nature right outside (or even inside) their doors.

First, in order to encourage the kids in camp to engage with the puzzle, we intend on asking the camp counselors to introduce the puzzle during the camp week. The children will be given a box with puzzle pieces on the last day of camp.

Second, to give the campers reasons to engage with Citizen Science work, we will embed it into the story of the puzzle, and have at least one optional side-puzzle to do with it. In case you haven’t hear of Citizen Science, it is when a scientist has a research question and basically crowdsources the data through regular people. These people are called Citizen Scientists. The side-puzzle will ask campers to download an app called iNaturalist that the folks at CMNH shared with us, and capture the nature they see with their phone cameras.

Third, we hope to give the kids in camp exposure and encouragement to work with a local community organization. In terms of exposure, we could include the organization in the story as well. For example, the puzzlers might get a piece of the organization’s website to work with. We could also make going to the organization another separate side-puzzle.

Engaging 11–13 year olds

Gaining and sustaining the attention of children this age is no small feat. With Stacie, we identified some guidelines for our future storyline. In terms of resources, we will look at Dirksen’s “Design for How People Learn” and “How Learning Works” by Ambrose et al.

• Find ‘unbelievable content’ and pay close attention to how we frame the story — pose an impossible situation and ask them a question
• Connect the storyline to their everyday lives — this will increase the chance that they understand the story from the get-go, and will be more engaging than if the setting is some “random city”
• Engage the user in the story — for example, if we create a video, have them click “go on”
• Find out what they find engaging

Conversation with Mr. Pat McShea and Ms. Laurie Giarratani

Mr. Pat McShea and Ms. Laurie Giarratani are the program officer for educational loans and the director of education at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, respectively. Today, Mr. McShea shared with us a wealth of knowledge and resource on the effects of forest fragmentation on birds in Western Pennsylvania.

He started by sharing a beautiful quote on bird migration from Edwin Way Teale, which had incredibly vivid and poetic language. This quote showed the power of language, and also the almost inconceivable migration journey that birds can make.

Then, Mr. McShea shared an activity he had used with children at the museum. He would give them these bird disks and ask the children to move them on a map covered with forest. A device that could read the barcodes on the disks would play some of those bird’s songs. Then, he would show the children another map, which showed the real effects of development, specifically, construction of natural gas pipelines. This map’s forest was fragmented by roads leading to drill sites. It turns out that some birds thrive in habitats that are close to the edge of forests, which made them the winners, while the ones who prefer deeper forest were the losers. Seeing nature turn into a “game” with winners and losers opened up complex conversations with the children.

Mr. McShea‘s activity opened up new ideas for our puzzle’s story. Ms. Giarratani helped us uncover more principles for engaging children. She suggested the following:

• Have children compare what they would have to do to match an animal’s feat. For example, a hummingbird drinks nectar to gain X calories for its migration, which is equivalent to a child drinking a coke every 10 minutes for two months (the numbers are not accurate)
• Show children something in a different way, such as with a timelapse
• When encouraging discussion between children, or between children and adults, give them something concrete and understandable to talk about. This way, disadvantages due to a lack of exposure are minimized and everyone can contribute something.
• Ask the children what they have seen change, at different scales (minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, their entire life) if you want to make change salient

Next Steps

• Create a plan for the rest of the semester
• Create a mapping of the camp and school calendar. One reason to do this is to identify times when the campers may be free — which will influence which Citizen Science events we choose to suggest to the campers.
• Investigate apps, toys and other things that engage 11–13 year olds, to build background knowledge and compile a list of puzzle mechanics