FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is SMILE?

SMILE is an online collection of math and science activities available to anyone, free of charge. We are also a community of educators who contribute, use, and comment on activities at howtosmile.org.

SMILE stands for Science and Math Informal Learning Educators; we are a pathway (an audience-specific branch) of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL.org).

SMILE's learning activities, tools, and services are available to all but are designed especially for those who teach school-aged children in non-classroom settings (like museums, zoos, aquaria, and afterschool or outdoor education programs). SMILE is dedicated to bringing the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities developed by informal science organizations around the country to the wider informal educator community, while encouraging that community to both use and contribute to SMILE's growing collection.

Heading up the project are Darrell Porcello and Sherry Hsi (Lawrence Hall of Science), Erin Van Rheenen (Exploratorium), Preeti Gupta (New York Hall of Science), Keith Braafladt (Science Museum of Minnesota), Cheryl McCallum (Children's Museum of Houston) and Margaret Glass (Association of Science-Technology Centers).

Who is SMILE designed for?

Resources in the SMILE library are available to anyone who wants high-quality, hands-on math and science activities for school-aged children or for the general public. But we are particularly interested in reaching educators in out-of-school learning environments: afterschool and outdoor education programs; science museums, aquaria, zoos, and technology centers; and homeschoolers creating their own curriculum.

What kinds of resources will I find in SMILE?

SMILE spotlights hands-on and interactive activities, both physical and virtual, that involve doing and learning. Activities take many forms, from downloadable lesson plans to how-to videos to online interactive games. SMILE activities teach science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and are developed by a wide range of organizations working with diverse audiences.

How is SMILE supported?

SMILE is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation under the National STEM Education Distributed Learning Program (Award Number 0735007).

Is there a cost to use/participate/contribute to SMILE? How do I join?

It costs nothing to contribute to SMILE, to use SMILE resources, or to participate in the SMILE community. You can access resources without being a member or signing in to the howtosmile.org site. To access the value-added community and annotation aspects of SMILE, you will be able to sign up online. It's fast and simple; you may already have an online account you can use as your sign-in, like Facebook or Gmail. Signing up costs nothing and takes only a few minutes.

Why would I want to contribute resources to SMILE?

1. Reach a wider audience: When your resources become part of the SMILE digital library, they become available to a large network of educators and institutions.
2. Be associated with quality learning: SMILE is selective, and the SMILE partners are well known for high-quality, educationally sound materials. Because materials are reviewed and vetted before being added to the library, resources offered under the SMILE banner have a virtual seal of approval from respected members of the informal science education community.
3. Get feedback: With the community tools at www.howtosmile.org, your resources will be rated and commented upon, providing useful feedback to resource creators.
4. Promote your institution: Because you can "brand" your resources with the name of your institution, your institution itself gets valuable exposure when people access your resources through howtosmile.org.
5. Be part of larger community: Don't hide your light under a bushel. Bring your valuable resources into the wider world of science education, to a place where educators will come to search for activities, rate their quality, and add tips on how to use them.
6. Be part of a movement: The SMILE team believe in open education - free exchange of knowledge, ideas, teaching approaches, and tools for education over the Internet. If you believe children should have access to high quality STEM materials that are easy to find, come join us!

Is SMILE a member of a library consortium?

SMILE is part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), which is a consortium of digital libraries. The founding partners that comprise SMILE are also members of the Association for Science-Technology Centers.

What is the SMILE widget and what can it do for me?

The SMILE Widget is a way of embedding SMILE search results onto your own web page, similar to how you can embed a YouTube video onto your web page. With some simple code that you can customize, you can display activities cataloged into SMILE without users leaving your site, and the search can be as general or specific as you'd like.

Click here to learn more about the widget.

CONTRIBUTORS

How do I contribute resources to SMILE?

To suggest a resource for the collection, fill out this simple form.

If your organization has a collection of resources you'd like to contribute, email us with a brief description of the collection and tell us whether the collection exists in its own database with its own metadata.

If I already have metadata, how would I get my resources into SMILE without cataloging each record individually?

Email us with a brief description of the format of your metadata, and we can discuss what the options are. SMILE metadata is based on the Dublin Core (DC) standard, and is designed to be interoperable with the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) as much a possible. As SMILE is the first NSDL pathway aimed at informal educators, we have extended the metadata to include fields of special interest to out-of-school educators serving a varied clientele.

If I am an Informal Science Institution (ISI), what tools do I get to help me build a collection?

We have a cataloging tool that we use to get metadata into SMILE and the NSDL. Email us and we can discuss a plan for listing your resources in SMILE.

We also have the SMILE Widget, which provides a way to embed SMILE search results onto your own web page. For more information, see above, "What is the SMILE widget?"

Is SMILE looking for individual activities or whole collections of activities?

We're looking for individual math or science activities, though they of course may be part of a larger collection. Howtosmile.org points to URLs that give educators immediate access to an activity. SMILE doesn't catalog larger web sites that contain many resources, although the URLs for those higher-level collections can be linked to the record for an individual activity.

Where are the resources hosted? Does SMILE host resources?

Resources are often hosted by their creators, but SMILE is not an archive. Resources that you recommend or contribute to SMILE must already have a digital home, so to speak. SMILE collects links to existing online activities, adds valuable metadata to make the resources more discoverable, and provides a web portal from which to search for these activities and to create community and annotations (like user ratings or teaching tips) around those resources.

If your organization lacks the capacity to host your own activities online, the Lawrence Hall of Science (a founding partner of SMILE) may be able to host those online resources on its servers.

How do you choose resources for SMILE?

We rely on educational organizations across the country to suggest appropriate resources or to contribute individual activities or entire collections of resources. Once submitted, we also review activities for quality.

For more on what we're looking for in a SMILE activity, see our Collection Quality Guidelines.

How is SMILE supporting/promoting diversity?

With the help of experts in the field, SMILE has developed a cataloging system that allows individual activities to be tagged as being developed for various underserved audiences. We have refined our vocabulary to allow catalogers to specify how an activity might be associated with an underserved group. For example, instead of simply associating an activity with "Native Americans," the cataloger would choose from a variety of specific tags, from "Addresses bias against this group" to "Identifies role models or mentors in STEM field from this group."

SMILE is also able to specify if and how an activity has been developed for students with barriers to learning, whether those barriers are in the form of vision or hearing impairment, limited English proficiency, or other accessibility issues.

In addition, the New York Hall of Science (a founding partner of SMILE) is the project's diversity liaison, charged with creating a network of partners that will contribute cultural and ability sensitive STEM resources that target and address particular diverse and underrepresented audiences. Examples of such content partners are TERC's Mixing in Math, which includes activities in Spanish, and SciGirls at Dragonfly TV.

Are SMILE resources aligned to standards?

Because SMILE is aimed primarily at out-of-school educators, aligning our activities with local, state, and national standards is not our main goal. We do note, however, when SMILE activities contain information on standards alignment, which allows educators to search by that criterion.

TECHNOLOGY

What tools are being used to build SMILE?

SMILE is powered by EduPak, a platform based upon Fedora open source repository software. This includes a collection management system called the NCS (NSDL Cataloging System) which provides cataloging capabilities. SMILE has created a customized version of the NCS that includes special metadata fields.

What search engine does SMILE use?

SMILE uses Solr, an open source search engine based on Lucene which was created by the Apache Foundation. Solr uses a Lucene index that is compatible with the NCS.