George Mason University

George Mason University, in partnership with the KID Museum and Montgomery County Public Libraries, will investigate how interactions among culturally and economically diverse families, STEM experts, and museum and library facilitators can help build interest in, knowledge of, and comfort with STEM. The project features the integration of object-oriented and making experiences; the use of functional linguistic tools that complement discourse analysis approaches to studying narrative and parent-child conversations; experts recruited from the fields of robotics, aeronautics, coding, optics, astronomy, botany, and others; and the exploration of constructs from nature of science and nature of STEM research in informal learning. The team will identify design principles for fostering collaboration between museums and libraries that are engaged in projects that combine STEM experts and making activities. The project will produce a framework, set of analytic tools, and a toolkit to help museums and libraries provide experiences for parents and young children that build knowledge and capacity to envision connections to the enterprise of science.