Habitat Tracker: Learning About Scientific Inquiry Through Digital Journaling in Wildlife Centers

Florida State University, in partnership with the Tallahassee Museum (a wildlife center in Tallahassee, FL), is working on a project to design and develop a digital journaling system that uses online and mobile technologies to help elementary school students better understand the nature of science. The project's goal is to encourage students to become active participants in the scientific inquiry process by collecting and analyzing data about wildlife and natural habitats, before, during, and after visits to the wildlife center. These visits will be part of a week-long intervention on scientific inquiry in which pre-visit planning and post-visit data analysis form essential parts of the learning experience.

The Tallahassee Museum (http://www.tallahasseemuseum.org) is a living museum that is home to a broad diversity of animals native to North Florida, including endangered species such as the Florida panther and red wolf; the animals are on display in 11 large natural habitat areas that visitors can view from elevated boardwalks. The museum is located on 52 wooded acres where visitors can learn about native plants, birds, tortoises, frogs, cypress trees, sinkholes and more. Students will research the museum's wildlife and natural habitats prior to their visit online, collaborating with students from other schools to develop research questions and determine what data they will need to gather in order to answer their questions. At the museum, students will use an iPad to record their observations about wildlife in digital journals, sharing their data with other students online. Back in the classroom, students will return to the project website to analyze data and answer their research questions.

Students participating in the Habitat Tracker project will learn about the nature of science by asking their own questions about the natural world, recording observations and drawing appropriate inferences from them, conducting peer review by discussing their data with students from other classes, and recognizing that science works in various empirically based ways. Such experience is essential if students are to master the new "inquiry and nature of science" benchmarks advocated by national science education reform efforts, and included in the State of Florida's science education standards. Drawing on more than a decade of prior research on mobile computing in museums, and supported through the use of extensive online resources in the classroom, this project will help approximately 1,500 students from rural and urban elementary school districts gain experience planning and conducting scientific inquiries over a period of three years.

This demonstration will present the Habitat Tracker systems and explore the design of the interfaces to be used by students participating in this project, including the online interfaces to be used in the classroom, and the iPad interfaces to be used in the museum. Conference attendees will be invited to experiment with the current version of the software, contributing data to the system in real time and providing feedback on its usability for incorporation into future iterations of the design.