The initial NSF proposal for ScratchR focused on creating networked opportunities for teams of kids who were already using Scratch and for whom a social component would add value to their education experiences. Last week, I was reintroduced to Scratch , a graphical programming language designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. MORE

At the end of the report, the NSF asked charities to predict what their fundraising would look like in 2018. Last year over 1,300 organizations responded to the Nonprofit Research Collaborative’s year-end Nonprofit Fundraising Survey (NFS). This annual report collects data on everything from overall sector growth, to fundraising goals, to regional data, to projections for the future. It’s thorough, to say the least. MORE

According to Benjamin Stokes, co-founder of Game sfor Change, the NSF has funded several game projects aimed at girls. Click here to listen to a very brief interview Over the weekend, I attended the Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh where artist and activist Faith Ringgold was one of the keynote speakers. Her talk was called "More than 30 Years in ArtMaking." " I had a chance to do a quick video interview with her about her thoughts on women artists. MORE

30 NSF fees. MORE

We received two rounds of NSF funding in the 1990s to expand. We received NSF funding for three years and then it cut off. Imagine the most community-based science center possible. Imagine it in a poor, immigrant farmworker community. It exists. It thrives. In California. In a Community Science Workshop. A couple months ago, I visited a Community Science Workshop for the first time in Watsonville, CA. I was awestruck. MORE

The director of the NSF has gone so far as to say that it will "usher in a technological age that dwarfs everything we have yet experienced in its sheer scope and power." Back in the early 1990s, I was "hoisting" web pages onto the Internet with a colleague David Green who worked at the New York Foundation for the Arts on the Arts Wire project. MORE

Wendy: Part of the thinking was that NSF supported the book Are We There Yet? , NSF requires grant applicants to build on prior knowledge--where do you get it? And with NSF's support, some of the very first things we did were around people developing traveling exhibits. So if NSF is funding it, is it only for science exhibitions? We see this as part of the network of sites that NSF is funding for informal science education. MORE

These games were developed by Carnegie Mellon with funding from the NSF, with the goal of harnessing collective intelligence (and interest in playing games) to tag all of the images on the internet. Let’s play a game. It’s called Tag this Image! Here’s how it works. You look at this picture. Now, write down the words that you associate with the picture. Are you having fun yet? MORE

As an example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) found that by not commuting, each NSF teleworker reclaims an average of 62 hours of their lives back and saves $1,201 a year. Extrapolating those savings across the agency, NSF teleworkers each year collectively spare the environment more than 1 million pounds of emissions and save more than $700,000 in commuting costs. MORE

When we received the award, we felt a great sense of opportunity and responsibility, since this was the first NSF-funded research study about bilingual families and their experiences in fully bilingual exhibitions. You know those research studies that make you want to immediately change your practice in some way? I recently read the BERI report on bilingual labels in museums and was blown away by its findings. This guest post was written by Steve Yalowitz, one of its authors. MORE

Ideum, the company that brought you ExhibitFiles (with ASTC), is conducting a survey on museums' needs in support of an NSF grant proposal (Open Exhibits) to build open source templates for simple interactive exhibits (timelines, digital collections, news kiosks). I was going to wrap a nice story and post around each of these but decided to just get the information out there. First! MORE

Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation. People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I don't like to give a list. I've only visited about 0.01% of the institutions out there and I suspect that the other 99.99% includes some real gems. But when I really think about it, all my favorites (so far) have one thing in common. MORE