Informal Science Education

The primary focus of NASA's Public Service Objective is to support Informal Science Education (ISE) activities. ISE is defined as activities designed to stimulate STEM interests outside the normal formal science education settings, ie, schools.  Although there is a distinct separation between informal and formal science education, there is increasing efforts to link both of them and to use the informal setting to address STEM gaps evident in formal science education.

To address this objective we are in the early stages of developing an informal science coalition in Maine. The Maine ISE Coalition will be an organizing principle for disparate ISE organizations in order to maximize student and parent access to ISE activities.

A model program for this coalition is RAISE (The Regional Alliance for Informal Science Education), a 501(c)(3) alliance of informal science providers (science centers, nature centers and museums) in Northeast Ohio (www.raiseohio.org). It was created to provide a vehicle for its member organizations to coordinate their collective education resources in order to advance the teaching and learning of science and to promote science literacy within the community at large. Its goal is to make a difference in the way science is taught, presented, and learned.