This past year, the TIDESS team was also able to publish some of our findings relevant to science learning for adults and children in the International Journal of Science Education: Part B: Communication and Public Outreach (IJSEB). Our paper is entitled “Inland adult and child interest in the ocean” and presents our insights from a series of focus groups we conducted to understand what adults and children are interested in learning about with respect to the ocean (and how). These focus groups were instrumental to the design of our ocean-related interactive content for our spherical display prototype that we have written about, e.g., here, here, and here. The paper abstract is here:

Interest is an important precursor to engaging the public in environmental and science learning. We used focus groups to explore ocean learning interests of inland residents of a coastal U.S. state, reasons for those interests, and differences between adults and children. We found adults and children generally had similar interests including categories like physical phenomena, sea life, and human impact on and from the ocean which could be a starting point for designers to gather specific local interests and context. Reasons for interest included knowledge for future decision-making which could be leveraged to encourage behavior change for ocean conservation and stewardship.

The full journal preprint and DOI link will be posted soon on our Publications page. We are proud that our work was deemed valuable to this community! These cross-displinary collaborative publications help expand the reach of our interdisciplinary research beyond our individual home domains and venues.