SCeTGo - Science Center To Go

There is sufficient evidence to suggest that both the persistence and the quality of learning are highly enhanced when the potential learner is actively participating in the learning process. Science Centers (SC) adopt this philosophy by offering intriguing and challenging exhibits that enable their visitors to experience science first hand by actively manipulating the experiments, thus delivering natural ways of active playful learning. Advanced visualization technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) are often used to enrich the experience by displaying computer generated objects that can help to illustrate otherwise hidden phenomena. However, experiencing mixed reality requires visiting the SC.

The Science Center to GO (SCeTGo) project brings together experts in science education, computer science and pedagogical evaluators in order to explore novel ways to use AR to support science education. The consortium consists of partners from Finland, Greece, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden and Romania. This two years project (with start in January 2010) is supported by the EU Life Long Learning program, KA3 on ICT.

SCeTGo aims to bring comprehensive learning experiences out of the Science Centers into a school’s classroom and everyone’s home. SCeTGo goals include crosscutting the boundaries between formal (schools, universities) and informal (SCs) learning settings and stimulating motivation of students of both genders and encourage students to consider science and science-dependent vocations as careers. The SCeTGo approach goes one step further and aims to bring similar comprehensive learning experiences out of the SC into a school’s classroom and/or everyone’s home. Its miniature exhibits - by “fitting into a pocket” and operating with ordinary hardware - enable learners to experiment whenever and wherever they please. This way the consortium makes full use of the powerful capabilities offered by tailor-made exhibits combined with AR.

The SCeTGo project builds upon the work performed in the very successful project, CONNECT (www.connect-project.net) where an AR system was developed, extensively tested and evaluated in science centres in UK, Sweden, Greece and Finland with school students.

In the framework of SCeTGo the consortium aims to:

a) develop a series of miniature exhibits that will illustrate various physical phenomena enabling learners to visualize the invisible through AR technology

b) develop a pedagogical framework that attempts to blend informal and formal learning and to situate learning in real- world contexts

c) develop advanced pedagogical scenarios that are shaped around a mission guided by a general scientific question

d) pilot, to validate and to demonstrate the SCeTGo approach in formal & informal educational environments