I agree: this is a beautiful exhibit. I am also wondering about scaffolding to ensure the kids play purposely with the exhibit. On a related note. How would you evaluate the impact of participation in the exhibit on children’s understanding of systems thinking in nature?

Thanks so much. Elc and Joni, I’m going to try and answer as best I can, please ask for clarification if you still have questions.

Facilitating this exhibition has been very challenging and is still evolving as we continue to observe and test in the space. We developed 2 approaches: 1 is more structured for school groups. We have 3 levels of scripts that get at different levels of cognitive understanding of systems; and then a lightly facilitated experience for casual visitors like families.

For both, we incorporate challenges and then breaks in sessions that allow for groups discussions, sharing of strategies and prompts from the facilitators about what to look for. The school groups get a much stronger narrative framing around the exhibit which incudes an exploratory session, a challenge sessions, and role assignments. A facilitator is always on the floor either modeling behaviors or giving prompts.

The way to move water is explained up front as is planting and chopping. How to strategically use these interactions to balance the environment is more of the point we’re trying to get at. We also have an intro video for general audiences https://vimeo.com/167117454/settings that gives basic directions.

The beauty of the exhibit is that so many variables can be changed: the amount of water shared by the habitats, the rate of evaporation, how fast plants grow and use water, etc. So we can set challenges for many different age groups. This puts a lot on the facilitators and we’re working in supporting them more. Some are having a difficult time with the open-ended exploration and being less didactic. It’s a tough job.

We’re working on follow up materials and having more exhibits in the space that make the connection to the real world. Sometimes the facilitators can get at that in discussions. But we’d like to make stronger connections.

We continue to test in the space. There are so many good research questions here, but more importantly, are they getting it? And if not, what can we do to help.

Thanks for your questions.

Thanks so much for this reply which is very helpful. I love the idea of having challenges that go with the exhibit. I am sure it is a delicate balance between allowing discovery in an informal environment and supporting purposeful activity. Do your challenges vary by grade level? Do you have data on which grade levels or ages of students are best suited?

Thanks for the reply Geralyn. My apologies if you have answered the following question in your response above; I may not have picked up on it. I’m wondering what outcomes you would measure and how would you measure whether the program had an effect on those outcomes.

Hi, We do vary the challenges by age level. Younger kids focus on balancing within an environment and we cut the water a bit during the challenge. Older kids balance across environments and we a range of scarce water to drought. We also change the rate of evaporation. Here’s a brief description of focus: K-2: Who lives here? Plant and Animal Diversity

Students will identify our imaginary creatures and plants in their habitats and what they need to survive and thrive. They will observe patterns of when and why creatures emerge or leave a habitat and use strategies to sustain creatures in their particular environments. Special attention will be paid to plant and animal relationships to each other and their dependence on their environment.

Learning goals: Cause and effect reasoning, pattern thinking, plant and animal diversity; ecosystems.

3rd-4th: Engineering the World: Plant and Animal Adaptations

Changes in the environment start with water- where it is and where it needs to go to sustain life. Students will collaborate to create strategies for distributing water based on what they discover about the plants and creatures living there. Students will focus on the relationship of plants and animals to the health and balance of the overall ecosystem.

Learning goals: Plant and animal adaptations, animals and plants and their environments, interconnectedness, understanding systems as a set of components, engineering

5th-9th: Keeping Balance in a Changing World: Environmental Interdependence

Students explore what happens across these imaginary habitats under different environmental conditions. Working in teams, they create strategies to manage extreme conditions such as drought through water management and distribution. They will experience dynamic equilibrium while they work to maintain balance among environments that are in flux. Students investigate stability and change throughout the system by discovering how small changes in one area can have huge effects elsewhere on the plant and animal life. Their challenge is too keep all 4 habitats in balance – having a diversity of plants and animals and enough water to maintain them.

Learning goals: Interdependence; stability and change in ecosystems, dynamic equilibrium, systems thinking, engineering

Elc, what’s really revealing are the talk back parts of the sessions. the evaluators engage the kids in deep discussions about what their theories are about how the world works based on their observations. After the first free exploration part, the kids are asked to try out different theories and see how they work. We’re collecting that data now. In terms of more formalized research, I’m going to need to talk to the research folks about this. I know they are working up a process. this kind of exhibit lays the foundation for understanding systems thinking in our world, but the work of making the connection doesn’t happen in the exhibit. So we have some work to do to go back to the classroom and evaluate. Does that answer your question? If not, let me know.

Great question. We don’t have data on that yet. But it’s something we’re very interested in. We are developing a mobile digital tool that uses the same habitats and characters and presents challenges that require computational thinking skills to solve. We’re also developing a session for 6-10 grades about science models and how they are developed and used – using Connected Worlds at the big example. It’s based on a model developed by The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia Univers.

Not at all really. Happy to say.

Do you find that students engage differently in groups rather than when there’s less competition with other visitors? Do students learn from each other enough that school groups can be more effective?

Initially we tried to frame the experience in a way to keep competition out of it (which I’m not totally in support of). Now we’re introducing some back in. Kids actually are more engaged when something is at stake, at least from my observations. but the experience varies quite a bit from the casual visitor to the school group. Casual visitors usually stay in their unit and work with each other. Younger kids, like pre-school are more likely to interact and copy each other. Older than that, they complain about how someone else is messing up their plan, but they don’t try and negotiate. The school group experience is very structured and facilitated and encourages working together and planning strategies. Kids also show each other what tricks they discovered. So I think everyone has fun, but the collaborative learning happens in the more structured and facilitated school group activities.

Thanks, May. Very simply, everything is connected. I know that’s too simple. From AAAS “Any collection of things that have some influence on one another can be thought of as a system. Thinking of a collection of things as a system draws our attention to what needs to be included among the parts to make sense of it, to how its parts interact with one another, and to how the system as a whole relates to other systems. Thinking in terms of systems implies that each part is fully understandable only in relation to the rest of the system.” So what we did was focus on 3 systems behaviors for Connected Worlds: feedback loops, causal chains and maintaining equilibrium in a constantly changing environment. Then we broke that down into some key statements that guided the interactions, which is outlined in the attached document, Development Doc. Thanks.

Thanks so much, Jeanne!