Inventions that show why accessible tools matter for scientific discovery

What if everyone had access to powerful tools for scientific learning and problem solving? Scientific discovery tools — from telescopes to magnetometers — help us answer questions and generate knowledge. But many powerful tools are too expensive or too difficult for non-experts to use.

Tool Foundry by Luminary Labs

Earlier this month, Luminary Labs launched Tool Foundry to advance scientific discovery tools that anyone can use. The initiative is funded by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Schmidt Futures to expand access to science.

Tool Foundry is accepting applications through May 30, 2019 for a four-month accelerator, designed to help citizen scientists, inventors, makers, and designers iterate and scale accessible tools. As part of the accelerator, cohort members will receive $50,000 in non-dilutive capital, expert mentorship, technical guidance, virtual learning modules, user testing opportunities, and an in-person boot camp at the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco.

Why does this matter? Accessible tools can inspire a deeper interest in science and empower people to indulge their curiosity, explore their environments, and solve problems relevant to their own communities. We’ve been inspired by the real-world impact of many accessible scientific tools that are already in use. Here are three examples of inventions that expand access to science:

Safecast’s open-source geiger counters

In 2011, an earthquake-triggered tsunami resulted in a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. Geiger counters, devices used to measure radiation levels, were in high demand and a global shortage led to soaring prices.

Local citizen scientists created what is now known as Safecast, a community-led initiative to collect and pool data using open-source, networked geiger counters. The project has produced over 120 million data points as of March 2019 — and by making that data available to everyone, Safecast has contributed to public safety knowledge and helped restore public trust.

Foldscope Instruments’ $1 Paper Microscope

Research on a microscopic level has led to breakthrough innovations from healthcare to agriculture. But traditional microscopes are often expensive and bulky. They break easily and are difficult to replace. Stanford scientists Manu Prakash and Jim Cybulski developed the Foldscope, a foldable microscope made mostly from paper. It’s ultra-portable and costs less than $1 to produce.

tools for scientific learning

To date, the organization has distributed nearly 650,000 Foldscopes, which have been used around the world — including to identify the microscopic eggs of agricultural pests in India, catalog the biodiversity of soil arthropods in the Amazon, and map pollen diversity in city landscapes.

Conservation X Labs’ DNA Barcode Scanner

Illegal wildlife trade generates between $7 billion and $23 billion each year in illicit revenue. Many fish, timber species, and other wildlife are difficult to identify visually — especially if they have been turned into processed products. DNA analysis can be a useful tool, but typically requires a lab with expensive equipment.

tools for scientific learning

Conservation X Labs’ low-cost, modular, portable DNA Barcode Scanner allows users to take a sample of a product and confirm its species identity — within an hour — without access to taxonomic experts or a laboratory. Working with scientists and law enforcement officials around the world, the scanner has contributed to the BOLD database, which now includes over 6.7 million DNA barcode sequences from more than 275,000 species.

Finding and Creating Tools

To discover other projects that use accessible, low-cost tools and instruments, visit SciStarter’s database of projects added by the global citizen science community. SciStarter is developing a citizen science tools database, which is still in beta.

Have you created your own tool, or do you have an idea for one? We’re looking for high-potential teams and individuals with prototypes for low-cost, high-quality, and easy-to-use physical tools for scientific discovery. To learn more about Tool Foundry and ask questions about the accelerator, join our informational webinar on Tuesday, April 23.

Tool Foundry is also developing and curating free resources to help inventors everywhere create, scale, and share their tools. Sign up to receive the Tool Foundry Journal in your inbox, and you’ll be the first to know when new resources are available.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bowling

Elizabeth is a Strategist at Luminary Labs, a New York-based strategy and innovation consultancy that helps private sector, nonprofit, and government organizations thrive in the face of change. Elizabeth leads Tool Foundry, an initiative expanding access to science. She has a keen interest in exploring questions with uncertain answers and is fascinated by the path to discovery. She seeks initiatives that effect real change and is interested in how technological advances will transform industries and society.

What is SciStarter?

SciStarter is the place to find, join, and contribute to science through more than 3,000 formal and informal research projects, events and tools. Our community of citizen science projects enables discovery, organization, and greater participation in science. This is also the place to track your contributions, bookmark things you like, and network with others. Join SciStarter to get started.

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The Value of Digital Tools in Science Classes

Digital learning experiences can be used to mirror the work of real scientists, boosting students’ engagement and learning outcomes.

October 9, 2019

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Juice Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Juice Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Educators are increasingly encouraged to update the learning experiences in their classrooms. This includes more attention to STEM learning, such as promoting the integration of technology and science instruction into everyday classroom experiences, and implementing pedagogical frameworks like open-ended inquiry learning and problem-based learning that mirror the work real professionals engage in—frameworks that guide students to “play the whole game at the junior level.”

These considerations are important for guiding students to be ready to take on a highly scientific and technological world. Merely implementing more open-ended science instruction or using applications on laptops or iPads doesn’t necessarily improve student learning, though. It’s how we design and use technology in schools that can truly improve students’ learning outcomes.

Fortunately, the scaffolds and supports within technologies can act in the service of science learning.

Role-Playing as Scientists

Allowing students to get into the shoes of scientists and to mirror the work they do is a powerful technique to get students interested in a science field by offering them opportunities to practice the skills that scientists use on a daily basis. This can increase students’ sense of identity in science, self-efficacy in science work, and general affect toward science.

Digital structures that enable students to step into the shoes of scientists include first-person narratives and role-playing scenarios like the digital learning environment EcoMUVE, which was developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It is a curriculum for middle school students in which they enter a virtual world and must figure out why their local ecosystem is declining. In programs like this, students can play as an avatar and explore an engaging virtual world, talk to scientist non-player characters, use scientific tools, and conduct authentic experiments.

By working through these digital scenarios, students practice science-related skills and processes, ultimately contributing to the transfer of scientific understandings.

Problematizing Learning Tasks

Problematization is a pedagogical technique that makes parts of a learning task problematic in some way, with a goal of increasing students’ problem-solving skills. Problematization is often used to invite students to puzzle over specific processes and ideas. In EcoXPT—a soon-to-be-released program from Harvard—new scientific information is dispensed as the program progresses, meaning that students must rethink their initial hypothesis.

Digital structures that provide this kind of just-in-time information include help buttons and tutorials. During digitally enabled open-ended and problem-based learning scenarios, reminding students about available automated help and tutorial buttons during a confusing part of the work allows them the opportunity to further their understanding at their own learning edge. Tutorials can help explain difficult concepts or tools that students use in these digital learning contexts, ultimately deepening their scientific understandings.

Illustrating Complex Processes

There are many complex processes that students have to reason through in science learning. Oftentimes, these processes are at the heart of the scientific understandings we hope students will gain. For example, consider genetic processes, which can be difficult for students to grasp. Teaching Genetics With Dragons from the Concord Consortium has three programs that offer middle and high school students an engaging way to learn about some of the complex intricacies of genetics in a playful digital learning platform.

This kind of experience aids students as they reason through highly complex and scientific processes.

The Value of Interactivity

A key beneficial aspect of digital learning is interactivity. Technology can also provide many opportunities for students and teachers to collaborate, such as when students are working in larger groups in online peer learning interactions. Numedeon’s Whyville is a great example of an online community where preteen students can create a character, interact with friends online, and participate in science, math, and history activities. Teachers can aid students in thinking about their role in the online community, and how their learning is progressing throughout such online activities.

Teachers play an integral role in these interactions as mentors supporting students in their developing understandings by providing additional support and pushing students to deeper learning.

Aiding Teachers in Assessment

Assessing student understanding in science learning is important for teachers, who must determine where their students are and figure out how to design learning experiences to deepen their knowledge even more. Digital learning contexts allow teachers to build in different types of assessments to periodically assess student understanding. These assessments can be formative and diagnostic, or summative.

These assessments can include typical quizzes or multiple-choice questions that appear in order to assess students’ understanding of scientific content. Digital quizzes allow for quick feedback to students, aiding them in assessing their own learning, which can be particularly helpful in learning complex scientific concepts and processes. Digital quiz results can also be visible to teachers, highlighting student progress and allowing them to see where each student is in their learning without the hassle of paper and pencil grading. Digital assessment may also take the form of a concept map, a medium that allows students to express their understanding visually.

https://blog.scistarter.org/2019/04/inventions-that-show-why-accessible-tools-matter-for-scientific-discovery/

https://www.edutopia.org/article/value-digital-tools-science-classes