Abstract Pilot projects have emerged in cities globally as a way to experiment with the utilization of a suite of smart mobility and emerging transportation technologies. Automated vehicles (AVs) have become central tools for such projects as city governments and industry explore the use and impact of this emerging technology. This paper presents a large-scale assessment of AV pilot projects in U.S. cities to understand how pilot projects are being used to examine the risks and benefits of AVs, how cities integrate these potentially transformative technologies into conventional policy and planning, and how and what they are learning about this technology and its future opportunities and risks. Through interviews with planning practitioners and document analysis, we demonstrate that the approaches cities take for AVs differ significantly, and often lack coherent policy goals. Key findings from this research include: (1) a disconnect between the goals of the pilot projects and a city’s transportation goals; (2) cities generally lack a long-term vision for how AVs fit into future mobility systems and how they might help address transportation goals; (3) an overemphasis of non-transportation benefits of AV pilots projects; (4) AV pilot projects exhibit a lack of policy learning and iteration; and (5) cities are not leveraging pilot projects for public benefits. Overall, urban and transportation planners and decision makers show a clear interest to discover how AVs can be used to address transportation challenges in their communities, but our research shows that while AV pilot projects purport to do this, while having numerous outcomes, they have limited value for informing transportation policy and planning questions around AVs. We also find that AV pilot projects, as presently structured, may constrain planners’ ability to re-think transportation systems within the context of rapid technological change.
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DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.21689.11369
The goal of What-if Hypothetical Implementations in Minecraft (WHIMC) is to develop computer simulations that engage, excite, and generate interest in science. WHIMC leverages Minecraft as a learning environment for learners to interactively explore the scientific consequences of alternative versions of Earth via “what if?” questions, such as “What if the earth had no moon?” or “What if the earth were twice its current size?” Learners using our mods are invited to make observations and propose scientific explanations for what they see as different. Given ongoing discoveries of potentially habitable worlds throughout the Galaxy, such questions have high relevance to public discourse around space exploration, conditions necessary for life, and the long-term future of the human race. Studies in our project are occurring across three informal learning settings: museum exhibits, after school programs, and summer camps. Our research is driven by the following research questions: 1. What technology-based triggers of interest have the strongest influence on interest? 2. Which contextual factors are most important for supporting long-term interest development? 3. And, what kinds of technology-based triggers are most effective for learners from audiences who are underrepresented in STEM?
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- Award ID(s):
- 1713609
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10157299
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Connected Learning Summit Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 262-263
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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de Vries, E. ; Hod, Y. ; Ahn, J. (Ed.)Our work investigates interest triggering, a necessary component of sustaining and developing long-term interest in STEM. We gathered interview data from middle school aged learners (N = 7) at a science-focused Minecraft summer camp over a period of one week. We first identified STEM interest triggering episodes, then categorized each episode based on codes developed previously by Renninger and Bachrach (2016). Our initial findings show differences in the frequency of interest triggering episodes across individuals and suggest that personal relevance and the use of Minecraft played prominent roles.more » « less
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This Full-Length Research Paper investigates the difficulty imposed by spaced retrieval practice in nine introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. By improving student performance in these courses, evidence-based pedagogical practices have the potential to increase graduation and success in STEM fields. Spaced retrieval practice is a technique in which questions on the same topic are asked repeatedly over time with intermittent delays. Spacing may initially make retrieval more difficult because it requires learners to recall information from long-term as opposed to short-term memory. However, this difficulty may ultimately be “desirable” because spacing often produces memory benefits in the long-term. The current paper examines the difficulty imposed by spaced retrieval in the nine STEM courses, using data collected from a 3-year project funded by the National Science Foundation. Results indicated that the magnitude of the difficulty imposed by spacing varied widely across the diverse STEM barrier courses. We anticipate that we will find similarly wide variability in the effectiveness of spaced retrieval practice in students' final learning outcomes, which will be investigated in future work.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.21689.11369
