The impact of an informal education program on participant attitudes towards science across remote and in-person settings.

The Girls at the Museum Exploring Science (GAMES) program, run out of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History for the last 20 years, is a community engagement program that aims to foster a positive attitude towards science in elementary school-aged girls. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person GAMES program has added remote sessions.

We use 5 years of survey data collected from program participants to gauge the impact that the GAMES program has on participant attitudes towards science and scientists. We partition these data into four groups based on instructional setting: in-person at school, in-person at University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, remote from home, and remote from school. We find that the GAMES program increases the proportion of participants who can see themselves becoming scientists across all instructional types. Notably, the programs that take place outside of school settings (either in-person or remote) have greater positive impacts on participants than programs that take place inside of schools. Additionally, participants across all groups use more technical language in their post-program survey responses than in their pre-program responses, indicating increased comfort with scientific concepts. Remote GAMES programs have more modest impacts on participant attitudes towards science and scientists, though a positive impact is still observable. This positive impact on participant attitudes towards science across all instructional groups leads us to conclude that both in-person and remote instruction of the GAMES curriculum benefits children from underrepresented groups in science. Remote instruction in particular has the ability to reach many more participants, specifically participants located in rural areas and/or areas with less direct access to science resources, and represents a promising avenue for future informal science education opportunities.