Inspiring children to pursue a career in science is a worthy pursuit for many reasons. One way to achieve this is to actively engage children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning from an early age. However, it is not always possible to integrate all the STEM fields in one activity. Rather, careful consideration of…

Access to clean drinking water is a major problem for many people across the world. Desalination is being increasingly used in many countries to provide this important resource. Desalination technology has received varying degrees of support in the communities in which this technology has been adopted. Productive communication suggests we…

In this paper, we propose computational scientific inquiry (CSI) as an innovative model for learning important scientific knowledge and new practices for "doing" science. This approach involves the use of a "game-like" virtual world for students to experience virtual biological fieldwork in conjunction with using an agent-based…

Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science…