Conducting Interviews and Administering Surveys
Maryland Science Center
The MSC is a science museum located in Baltimore’s inner harbor region. We conducted two surveys there. We selected four films from our astro-animation class. The animation loop of the four films lasted eight minutes.
School teachers survey
The first survey was given to a group of school teachers who were attending a workshop. The set of films was shown to the teachers during their lunch break on a large screen in their workshop classroom. The animations were shown without providing any additional scientific context. Hard copy surveys were then distributed and the link for the electronic version of the survey also was provided. Thirty-seven teachers completed the survey.
Regular visitors survey
The second survey at the MSC was given to regular visitors to the museum. For a period of approximately two hours during the afternoon the set of films was projected onto the sphere used for Science on a Sphere. This projection was in a part of the museum where people could wander in and out. A poster was displayed to advertise the survey. Visitors who were in the area were approached and asked to complete the survey. It took approximately fifteen minutes for a respondent to watch the films and take the survey.
NASA GSFC Visitor Center
Animations were presented at the NASA GSFC Visitor Center on April 28, 2018 for the final screening of the class. This occurred on “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work' Day.” The screening was attended by a variety of NASA employees, including scientists who had worked with the students, and a number of their children. The audience thus included mentor and non-mentor scientists and members of the general public in a wide age range. Students presented all of their films from 2018, and then described the process, and the audience asked questions and provided feedback. Hard copy surveys were provided as well as the link to the electronic survey. The entire session took approximately one hour.
Fermi Symposium Public Outreach Event
In conjunction with the International Symposium for the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope held in Baltimore in October 2018, a screening of the animations was held at a public outreach event at MICA at the same time. The screening was advertised to the public in a variety of ways including flyers and on newspaper websites, but a large portion of the audience consisted of meeting attendees and some family members. For each film, the animation techniques were briefly described by an animation professor, and the science content was presented by a NASA scientist. After the screenings, a panel of student animators and faculty instructors took questions from the audience. Links to the survey were provided, as were hard copies of the survey.
Survey with Students/Video Interviews at MICA
We interviewed students from the 2018 astro-animation class. Two stations were set up for conducting the interviews. Nine out of 17students, as well as the teaching assistant, participated in the interviews. Each interview lasted 20 to 30 minutes.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
We visited the SAIC and attended a session of a class that is jointly given there by an astrophysicist, Kathryn Schaffer, and an artist, Paola Cabal. Unlike our astro-animation class, the SAIC program is open to any visual art form and does not have a large outreach component (Brotman, 2015). Arcadias and Corbet presented an overview of the MICA astro-animation program and showed some examples. We then conducted audio or video interviews with eight students from the SAIC class as well as a video interview with both instructors Schaffer and Cabal. All interviews were open-ended and lasted approximately ten to 20 minutes per person for the students and 45 minutes for Schaffer and Cabal.
Online Only from AstroAnimation.org Website
We made the online survey available on our website that contains the students’ astro-animations. Any visitor to the site was able to complete the survey.
Analysis results
Comparison of MICA and SAIC (ARTIC) Responses
The word frequencies obtained from the comparison of the MICA and SAIC (ARTIC) interviews are shown in Figure 12. Words near the red line in this figure are used with about equal frequencies by both schools, while words far away from the line are used much more by one school compared to the other. There do not appear to be large differences between the two groups. In some cases the differences are related to the two types of classes. For example “NASA” and “anim” are more commonly used by the MICA students, while “PRACTIC” and “STUDIO” are more frequently used by SAIC students.
Fig. 12. Word Frequency Comparison
For the various survey respondents, the word frequency clouds and associated emotional responses are shown below.
