When COVID-19 temporarily shuttered schools, museums and other educational venues in the spring of 2020, educators had little choice but to pivot from their normal routines and to establish new ways to reach their students and engage their audiences. Despite the challenging conditions, many educators and organizations rose to the occasion. The forced experimentation fueled innovation that will continue to transform how educators across settings and audiences approach the design of science learning experiences, particularly with respect to the optimization of technology and tools for more interactive and engaging virtual activities.

Our Curiosity-Driven Science Initiative stepped up to this challenge. The initiative seeks to expand and enhance opportunities for meaningful engagement with science, cultivating interest and capabilities through science-rich experiences for youth and the general public. At hand at the outset of the pandemic, initiative grantees embraced the opportunity to develop and share solutions that used technologies in novel ways, and explored avenues such as developing accessible pandemic-related online course material and using simulation-based educational material for real-time tracking, interactive science simulations and engaging virtual field trips. 

Some of the timeliest projects had roots in work begun well in advance of the pandemic. In November 2019, the foundation provided a grant to the Broad Institute in support of Operation Outbreak, an educational platform and interactive simulation focused on infectious diseases and outbreak preparedness for a local public health crisis led by Pardis Sabeti, Ph.D., Todd Brown, Ed.D., and Andres Colubri, Ph.D. While initially intended for middle-school aged youth, the outbreak scenario and accompanying materials – including an application to track spread through exposure by social distancing – had much broader utility and audiences, including first responders. So, too, was the demand for more supporting material, which resulted in a partnership with Complexly and Crash Course to develop online modules that form the basis for a new pandemic-related high school science course, and collaborations with educational institutions at all levels as they sought to bring students back to campuses in educative ways.   

Research points to the power of immersive and experiential learning opportunities, core features of the Operation Outbreak simulation, in terms of sparking interest and motivating learning. In response to the demand for educational material about the topic and interest in use beyond the intended purpose, the Operation Outbreak team sought new avenues of technology to extend their reach while maintaining the interactive and deeply engaging nature of their work.

One way to ensure content reaches more people is to make it easily accessible, and another grantee that was quickly responsive to the move to more virtual experiences was the PhET Interactive Simulations group at University of Colorado Boulder. A longtime Moore Foundation partner, PhET develops and provides free, award-winning open-source science and mathematics simulations. Anybody can access and download these interactive simulations online, and unsurprisingly, usage exploded as lockdowns took effect and educators and parents went searching for high-quality material. These simulations allow users to explore and experiment with phenomena at their own pace. PhET is working to expand their library of simulations and collaborate with partners to better serve at scale a wide range of audiences including schools, communities and interested individuals. 

While some groups may be eager to explore science and the natural world, various circumstances, such as funding or location, may not allow them to take advantage of in-person experiences even outside of a global health crisis. The pandemic created opportunities to amplify and expand technology-based activities that lent themselves to the virtual world COVID dealt. It also created space to push the bounds for new and more accessible educational experiences that still capture elements of interactivity and surprise that well-designed in-person learning can offer. Borne out of the desire to use technology to bring science to students in ways that convey the excitement and adventure of good field trips, Stanford University’s Transforming Learning Accelerator embarked on a multi-stage effort to develop and evaluate virtual science field trips. Field trips have long been a phenomenal way to generate interest in the natural world, and the Moore Foundation grant for this project seeks to understand whether and in what ways well-designed virtual field trips can lower barriers to entry by providing robust interactions, wherever the participant may be. 

"Despite its many downsides, the pandemic provided a moment ripe for experimentation in education. The field had no choice but to do things differently,” said Janet Coffey, program director of science learning and engagement at the Moore Foundation. “While it is still too soon to say, I think the chances are high that we will emerge from the pandemic with novel formats and new possibilities for science learning, as a result of creative work by our grantees and others that found new ways to optimize technology to lower barriers and bring opportunities to experience and do science to more people.”

The foundation’s grantmakers continue to monitor the ways in which the pandemic’s changing educational landscape influences its work within the Curiosity-Driven Science Initiative. While some adaptation is inevitable no matter how good a plan is, the team is excited to realize the possibilities of bringing together highly interactive in-person experiences and new emerging hybrid formats with scaling capabilities offered through technology. The aim is to make opportunities for all youth to experience meaningful and sustained engagement science more commonplace. 

 

 

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