March Mammal Madness and the power of narrative in science outreach.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach - gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products - to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping "play-by-play" narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness

Sparking Creative Prowess through a Peculiar Design Challenge: A Mocktail Design Charrette - Dataset

This dataset was the result of a survey from a recent experiment in mocktail design conducted with a group of industrial design students. This pedagogical strategy was devised to foster students’ creativity and confidence. After observing a level of creative deficit among the student body, we initiated an annual design charrette in 2021. Through the charrette, a short, sprint-like effort, we aimed to provide an exhilarating, low-risk space to foster students’ creative prowess. After two years, with interesting yet mitigated results where we observed students taking the assignment too seriously, at the expense of risk-taking, we looked for parameters that would more successfully support the goal of sparking a creative mindset. Inspired by speculative design methods, boundary objects, growth mindset, and self-efficacy theory, our most recent approach was to engage students with an uncanny topic - mocktails - to catalyze multi-level creative engagement.CSV of de-identified survey result