This grant funds an ambitious new project by the Chemical Heritage Foundation to build a free mobile app for iPad that recreates the excitement and educational potential of working with a chemistry set. Structured like a game, the app will instruct users in the principles of chemistry and guide them through a series of increasingly complicated virtual experiments that explore the properties of matter, thermodynamics, gases, and chemical energy. The app will be focused on 12 to 15 year olds and, when completed, will be available to download for free. The project is an experiment in how to leverage new developments in information technology and media to advance the public understanding of science.

This two-year grant funds a project by John Durant and the MIT Museum, leaders in the Science Festival Alliance, to launch 12 new science festival initiatives in communities with "relatively small resource bases," supporting festivals in communities that would otherwise lack the budget or experience to launch their own. The Science Festival Alliance has identified four lead festivals-in Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, and Missouri-to act as models. Harnessing experienced mentors, the Science Festival Alliance will use modest challenge grants and how-to resources to help local science festival efforts get off the ground. Additionally, they will strengthen connections within the science festival community while establishing methods expanding festivals to under-resourced communities. This grant is a promising way to expand the science festival experience to communities across the country and, if successful, would represent a 33 percent increase in the 36 local science festivals that currently exist in America.

This grant funds the production of an interactive new eBook, Innocence, Guilt and Science. Authored by New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer and produced in conjunction with the Innocent Project, the book will detail some of the more than 250 death row convictions and life sentences the Innocent Project has helped overturn through the use of DNA evidence. The book will explore how cutting edge advances in genomics is affecting the judicial system, including how they sheds light on the subjective distortions of more traditional forensic "science" based on perception and memory. Innocence Guilt and Science will also push the envelope of eBook technology, integrating traditional written narrative with photos and court documents, in-depth video clips, links to online resources, and interactive games that will allow readers to explore scientific themes. Innocence, Guilt and Science will provide the public with a deeper understanding of the science of DNA testing and how it is used to identify individuals; and also with a greater grasp of the science of perception, cognition, and the many distortions that our memories introduce.

This grant provides two years of continuing support to the Science Festival Foundation to produce the World Science Festival, a weeklong series of more than 50 lectures, demonstrations, and public exhibits designed to celebrate science and scientific discovery. In addition to funding the organization and production of the festival for the next two years, funds from this grant will also support the Science Festival Foundation's continued efforts to increase its impact by establishing national and international distribution networks for Festival-created content, to expand its online media platform, and to develop programming for use in science classrooms in New York and beyond.

Made in recognition of the International Year of Chemistry, this grant supports a year-long slate of activities planned by the Chemical Heritage Society (CHS) to inspire and educate the public about the critical role of chemistry and chemists in contemporary society and to increase public understanding of the role of women and minority women in chemistry. Activities supported under this grant include the recording, transcription, and editing of ten interviews with women chemists, the production of seven 12-to-15 minute web profiles of women in chemistry to be distributed online through the Chemical Heritage Society's website, and the inclusion of an additional section to the CHS website dedicated to the Women in Chemistry product. Additional funds are provided to allow CHS to develop and implement an outreach strategy to disseminate these new online materials widely through social media.

Each year since 2009, visitors to the World Science Festival's Street Fair in New York City have experienced the Math Midway, a large and crowded carnival filled with mathematical toys and activities such as square-wheeled bicycles you can ride on a cycloidal track and plastic polyhedral solids that reveal surprising cross sections when you shine laser light through them. The Math Midway is one of many successful components unique to the World Science Festival, which the Sloan Foundation helped launch though its program on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Most science festivals struggle to present any kind of compelling mathematical content at all. The creators of Math Midway would now like to share what they have built, as well as what they have learned, with science festival planners and participants throughout the country. Funds from this grant will support efforts by Museum of Mathematics founder Glen Whitney to develop up to 20 portable versions of the Math Midway exhibitions that can travel to science and mathematics festivals across the country. The Science Festival Alliance, a Sloan Foundation grantee, has already arranged for these exhibits to be displayed and tested by organizations operating under its umbrella, including science festivals in San Diego, Philadelphia, Harlem, Cambridge, and the Bay Area. The project will also train local mathematicians to staff these exhibitions. Independent evaluation of the construction, deployment, and reception of the first six such kits is also part of the project plan under this grant, and will help clarify what works and what next steps might make sense going forward to enhance public engagement with mathematics.