Our mission is to use science, technology and engineering to develop persistent curiosity and to show that knowledge is empowering.

IMPACT & PROGRAM STATISTICS

Program Statistics

We incorporated on January 29, 2007. Since then:

We have trained over 300 volunteering professional engineers, undergraduate and graduate students.
Our volunteering instructors have conducted 165 multi-session courses (25,000 student-hours and 8000 parent-hours of instruction). 36 of these courses were Family Science Courses.
Our courses have reached more than 7600 under-served children and their parents in Los Angeles, New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Click here for our 2010 Annual Report.

Click on the graph below to see what we learned and accomplished in 2009.

Click here for a sketch of all our activities and projects from 2008.

Research

Robyn Hightower, a market researcher has volunteered her time and expertise to help us understand what obstacles parents face to participating in our Family Science Courses, how we can address these issues to increase participation from families that are new to us and to identify and address their needs.

We conducted two surveys (one in 2008 with 400 parents and another in 2009 with 943 parents) from 14 partner schools in Los Angeles. The goal of the surveys was to inform decisions on whether Iridescent should develop an online Parent Social Networking Site, what features to incorporate on that site and what resources to develop that would help parents engage their children in science after the courses. The survey also had some questions determining interest in co-investing and the Parent Leadership Program.

Hightower, R. and Chklovski, T. (2010). What informal science education resources do urban south Los Angeles parents want?. Los Angeles, Iridescent.

Urban School Needs Map Project: Data-driven resource allocation

Our goal is to streamline our effort and resource allocation methods to ensure cost-efficient, long-term impact. We are partnering with an information visualization research group, Density Design and Dr. Marco Fattore (Dept. of Statistics, Bicocca University) to use a combination of existing data (zip code income, education and crime and school API and crime) and gathered survey data (measuring teacher and parent commitment) to determine which schools would be suitable long-term Iridescent partners. This data is represented in an interactive Urban School Needs Map that will help not only Iridescent, but parents, other urban education providers and funders to compare schools more easily. All data is taken from publicly available data sets.

Visualization tool – Dust

Click here to access the visualization tool.

Family Science

After three years of applying for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Informal Science Education grant, we finally were awarded the grant to work with the same group of Family Science Participants for five years. We are now in year two of the project called, “Be a Scientist”.
We were inspired by the Seven Up! documentary series and our goal is to create something similar with the families who participate in our Family Science Courses. The following videos are from the first year of the project and the students are all first graders. We hope to bring four more each year as these students go through elementary school.
The videos have been created by Prof. Jed Dannenbaum, Prof. Doe Mayer and their amazing students – Alejandro, Jessie and Josie from the USC Cinema School.
Some points to keep in mind and notice:

We are targeting parents with this video. The technical content has intentionally been downplayed. We emphasize the fact that anyone can help their child learn and do science – regardless of background or prior attributes. These videos will be played at various Back to School night recruiting events to help parents see the value of engaging in learning activities alongside their children.
Success for Iridescent is when the parent continues the learning that we initiated in the classroom. This is what we see in the Medina Family video. Parents are the biggest influencers in a child’s life. Our strategy is to exponentially increase our program’s impact by bringing the parents along with us on our mission.
Success for Iridescent is also when the parent supports and encourages the child to persist through failure as Knick’s mother does when he despairs.

Measuring K-12 Student Learning

The following responses are from a Family Science Course (funded by AAUW) that was conducted only for girls and their parents by women engineers. The students were asked whether they would like to become an engineer or a scientist and this is what they said:

Phone survey results conducted with parents a year after their participating in a Family Science Course (May 2010)

Pre and post tests measuring K-12 student learning from Spring 2009.

Report on our Animal Locomotion course trial run in Salinas (Nov 2008).

Analysis of student learning in our 2008 summer programs in East Palo Alto.