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Wrapping Up

Although I finished my data collection a few weeks ago (hence the lack of posting), I've been continuing my work with YAA and the i.d.e.a. Museum. Over the course of my Senior Research Project, I've gained experience with research in a non-scientific setting, and I've also learned more about what makes outreach efforts successful.
While my involvement with Young Authors of Arizona continues, the awards ceremony two weeks ago marks my last event as a Student Leader with YAA. I recently committed to the University of Pennsylvania, and I hope to apply what I've learned about writing outreach to similar efforts in Philadelphia. For now, I'm looking into future projects for YAA and searching for new student leadership to make those projects happen. I'm also helping the i.d.e.a. Museum to develop a more formalized summer program for teen volunteers.
I've started putting together a Senior Research Project Presentation, summarizing my findings in a way that other organizations can hopefully use to evaluate their own outreach methods. In addition I've been planning my summer: it's hard to believe that the next few months will take me to Iowa, India, and Pennsylvania!
I'm so grateful for the opportunity I've had to conduct a Senior Research Project for the past few months. These several extra months in the "real world" enable BASIS students to leave the more restrictive aspects of a high school mindset behind and begin thinking about the future, rather than focusing on exams in the weeks leading up to graduation. I believe the independence and work experience the SRP has allowed me will prove invaluable when I arrive at college, and I'm lucky to end my high school experience on this note.

Updates & Epiphanies

The publication day event for Young Authors of Arizona went really well, and Convergence is ready to hit the shelves on April 11th, the date of the Scholastic Regional Awards Ceremony! At the event, we collectively drafted the back cover for the book, and we also recorded feedback from students and parents on future possibilities for YAA.

Among that feedback was a positive response to a proposal for more summer workshops, possibly including a summer camp that would span several days. While an overnight summer camp might be a year or more away, one that requires three hours a day could be feasible for older students, while younger students might be able to attend a day camp.

We also discussed sharing more YAA news via social media, involving more use of our Tumblr or Facebook accounts. Social media could also be used to create a group that would allow students to share and critique work, forming a community of writers that can sometimes be difficult to find in one's own school. Of course, there's no replacement for face-to-face interaction, so we're looking into connecting with creative writing clubs at high schools. Apart from this, we'd like to have more events that bring young writers across Arizona together, like poetry open mics. All these ideas made the event really productive in terms of forming a plan for YAA's future.

Meanwhile, I haven't been physically at the museum the last couple days due to illness, but here are some pictures I took a while ago at the i.d.e.a. Museum of the Build It! exhibit:


As you can see, the kids love the Statue of Liberty!

Kids learn about architectural history while building their own creations.

The museum features the work of local artists, like this photography series that captures action figures in lifelike images using scaled props and backgrounds.

Kids build "homes" out of a variety of materials.

Having web traffic information and survey results helps me see what customers look for in the museum, and a conversation I had with the marketing director recently helped me see outreach in a different way. Often, psychographic information is more revealing than demographic information in surveys; when 40% of museums across the country closed a few years ago, that understanding is what allowed the i.d.e.a. Museum to survive. They realized that instead of trying to expand their outreach beyond their most popular demographic, they should refocus their attentions to serve their current audience. And so they redesigned the museum to address the needs of ages 3-5, using surveys to understand what their target group wanted. After this conversation, I ended up rewriting my survey for Young Authors of Arizona so that it was shorter and focused more on returning from the feedback given at the publication day event. While submissions to Scholastic were overrepresented at BASIS and underrepresented outside of Scottsdale, YAA won't make a difference as quickly if we focus on expanding our audience. That's a slow process that can't occur without a solid foundation, no matter how we try to expedite it. Instead we need to focus on building a community within the reach of students who've already been exposed to the Awards and YAA. If we succeed in this, we'll automatically attract more students, and we'll have a stronger program to welcome them into. This marks a bit of a shift in the goal of my project, but I think it reflects what I've learned through my internship at the i.d.e.a. Museum. I really believe this is the right way to approach outreach, and I wouldn't have realized that without this SRP.

Short & Sweet

At the i.d.e.a. Museum, the information I need for my research is starting to fall into place!

I'll soon have access to the results for web traffic and the user survey, both from the i.d.e.a. Museum website. I'm also looking into all the schools and student groups that have visited the museum in the past year, and hopefully I can find patterns in that data in terms of school district, area, etc. In addition, I've continued to track activity on the Young Authors of Arizona Tumblr and the i.d.e.a. Museum Facebook page. Finally, I have data for the number of visitors who attend the i.d.e.a. Museum each week with coupons received at outreach events, which should give some indication of any patterns in the return on outreach. This is about six different sources of information to synthesize, so it should take some time, but I'm really excited.

In the next week or two, I'm hoping to hand out surveys for both the i.d.e.a. Museum and Young Authors of Arizona to collect more information about the current visitors/audience for their programs. But as of now, I'm not sure how large a sample size I'm going to be able to achieve for my surveys, which is a little worrying.

In addition, I would like to supplement this data using interviews with individuals who develop and use outreach programs, like the marketing director at the i.d.e.a. Museum or those involved in its partner programs.

I love a lot of the work I do at the i.d.e.a. Museum and with YAA that isn't directly connected with my project, so I do talk about that stuff quite a bit on this blog. I hope this post gives you all a better indication of where I am with my project and what exactly it entails!

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for Young Author's of Arizona's Publication Day event tomorrow, and it's gonna be a lot of fun. Because of that this update is brief, but I'll have a blog post up soon to let you know how the event goes!

STEM vs. STEAM

As many of you know, the acronym STEM refers to science, technology, engineering, and math, often in the context of education. STEAM adds art to the equation, and the i.d.e.a. Museum is all about incorporating the arts into the way we teach more technical and scientific subjects. For example, one project required students to use math in order to build a structure, but allowed them creative freedom with the structure's aesthetics.

In some ways, STEM education can be closed off because students decide so early whether or not it's something they want to go into, and so often you see young children deciding firmly against it because of stereotypes or assumptions. It's heartbreaking to see students assume that careers in science and engineering can't mesh with their creative interests, or that they simply "aren't smart enough" for those subjects. The United States has fallen behind in STEM education, but the answer to that problem is not cutting funding for the arts. Arts education is imperative when it comes to developing creativity, critical thinking, spatial reasoning, and other skills.

In elementary and middle school, kids self-identified themselves often as either left-brained or right-brained. There was a dichotomy between being logical and mathematical or emotional and artistic. But I've always loved both science and art, and I think they inherently pair well.

The following two infographics are both hanging in the museum's offices, and help explain the philosophy behind STEAM education. I'd love to hear your thoughts on STEAM, especially as it contrasts with simple STEM or arts education, as well as some of the statistics shown below!




The i.d.e.a. Museum has three events scheduled for outreach this Saturday, so we've been busy putting materials together for the booths and activities the museum will run at these events. As such I haven't gotten my hands on the numbers I promised last week yet, but I should be able to share them with you on Monday!

Good Times

I've just finished the second week of my internship at the i.d.e.a. Museum, and it's been a busy one! I'm gathering results from the survey on the museum's website and analyzing web traffic with the help of the museum's marketing director, LaTonya Jordan-Smith. But the museum's staff is small, and I've found myself helping out in many different areas of work. On Wednesday I found myself in the workroom getting my hands dirty and ripping apart electronics with the exhibit designers!

Last week I talked about the adobe brick project I was getting started on, and we've been playing around with different mixtures to see what can be safely and easily used by the kids who come to the museum. That project is heavy on drying time, so meanwhile I helped build models for architectural designs that will be used in some high school classrooms.

Meanwhile publication day is approaching fast for Young Authors of Arizona (March 14th at Phoenix Book Company). Here's an interesting graph of the visit length data from our Tumblr from February 15th to February 28th:
Visits to our Tumblr are split almost in half between brief visits and interested ones.
Visitors who spent less than 30 seconds on our page tended to click on one post and leave the website, while visitors who spent longer than an hour clicked around the various links on the page. It's still hard to see what attracts those short-term visitors to the page (or what makes them leave) as the activity seems quite random, but hopefully I'll start seeing patterns.

It's been a great week--while this may seem obvious, spending the entire day around cute, happy kids definitely does wonders for your mood. Everyone at the i.d.e.a. Museum is always super cheerful and sweet, always having a great time, and it's not difficult to see why!

Foundations


A badge (complete with the typically unflattering picture) can only mean one thing: I'm official!

It was my first week interning at the i.d.e.a. museum (that stands for imagination, design, experience, art), and every volunteer and staff member I met was as warm and welcoming as I could hope for. The museum has few full-time staff, and many of my colleagues are artists, architects, and engineers who have decided to lend their expertise to educating kids. Because the museum consists of a small group of employees and volunteers, they have plenty of back-burner projects for me to work on, and one of those is outreach.

Museum staff currently attend various events in order to get the i.d.e.a. museum name out there, including festivals and teacher conferences. (Coming up on March 28th is one such event that I think might interest some of you--the Southwest Maker Fest, a one-day festival that will feature the work of engineers, artists, cooks, and scientists.) One way the museum tracks the success of its outreach efforts is by passing out coupons at these events and tracking their return when people attend the museum.

This week I talked to i.d.e.a. museum's marketing director, and I'm excited to get my hands on web traffic and survey data from the museum's website next week. While I'll be able to use this data, I'm also looking into creating my own survey or updating the City of Mesa's!

Of course, as I work on my project behind the scenes, I've also found myself working the ground floor of the museum, where the current exhibition is titled Build It.

Clearly this picture was taken inside the museum, with the rainbow and everything.

I'm so impressed by how the museum translates engineering and design concepts to activities kids can enjoy while still learning something. There are stations to teach kids about everything from structural stability to storytelling to city planning. One activity actually invoked paintings produced by a local artist to start a discussion about homogeneity in suburban communities, which is a subject many would assume to be out of the reach of kids in the elementary school age bracket--but the museum has proved that wrong.

Unfortunately, because I would need a whole stack of parent permission slips, I can't share any pictures of kids interacting with the exhibits inside the museum. But next week I'll share pictures of the exhibits alone from before the museum opens, so you can see just what I mean. I'll soon have a hand in designing some of these activities, starting with one on adobe brick! I hope to design an activity that can communicate the scientific concepts involved in this ancient building technique, as well as its history.

Meanwhile, publication work rolls on at Young Authors of Arizona, and I'm happy to announce the three cover options that we're having young writers vote on:




Each of these works earned a Gold or Silver Key in the Scholastic Art Awards, and I'm excited to see which ends up wrapping together the best writing we received this year!

I've recently begun my work as a mentor-editor in the poetry category, trying to balance between helping pieces reach their full potential and preserving their artistic integrity. Since I only know one of the writers I'm mentoring, it's been really interesting getting to know these students through their writing alone. That said, we're conducting the process through Google Docs this year, and the digitized nature of that connection can make the work feel a little impersonal. This has me returning to that idea of having a platform for writers to interact on our website, because I do think that the "social media" aspect can actually make editing a more personal process, as paradoxical as that may seem.

I can't wait to continue my work next week with both the i.d.e.a. museum and Young Authors of Arizona! I love getting to know new people, and that's probably the biggest difference I've noticed in my life since Senior Research Projects began--I've been meeting so many people with completely different lifestyles, outlooks, and goals from mine. It's a very rewarding and humbling experience, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to enter the "real world" this way through the SRP!



In The Beginning

Due to my mentor's availability, my on-site internship with the i.d.e.a. museum won't begin until the coming Wednesday. In the meantime, I've had plenty to do as Young Authors of Arizona prepares for the regional Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony and the publication of our second anthology!

On February 2nd, we announced the 2015 regional writing honorees on our website. Since then, we've been in discussions to select pieces for publication from hundreds of award-winning works. Soon, we'll be contacting authors, connecting them with mentor-editors who will help them to edit and polish their works. I'll be serving as a mentor-editor in the Poetry category, and I'm excited to work with other writers!

While our title's still a secret, I've narrowed down three options for the anthology's cover from dozens of award-winning entries in the Arizona Scholastic Art Awards. When I contact soon-to-be-published authors, I'll be including a poll so the writers can help to choose the cover themselves.

As we head into spring, the YAA Board has been discussing different outreach strategies. Among our ideas are a state catalog analogous to the national catalogs published by Scholastic each year, a platform for students to share and comment on writing, and previewing unpublished writing on our blog. I've yet to pilot any of these ideas, but there certainly is a wide range of possibilities, and any input or feedback from my readers is appreciated!