Data to the Rescue: Penguins Need Our Help! – An informal STEM learning program

Effectively addressing climate change requires comprehensive climate literacy, which enables learners to understand and contextualize environmental shifts, through analyzing, interpreting, and applying environmental information in evidence-based decision-making. Exploring data literacy skills and building a knowledge base of climate science supports informed decisions and effective societal responses. Data to the Rescue: Penguins Need our Help! is an innovative informal learning club program cultivating these essential literacies in youth by leveraging real-world ecological data on penguin populations near Palmer Station (Palmer LTER). Through engaging activities and discussions, the program strengthens science skills: visualizing, analyzing, and interpreting data sets within a changing climate context. A culminating Data Jam challenges youth to communicate the data and its implications. This three-year pilot project showed significant (p < .05) increases in youth STEM identity and revealed unexpected gains in polar science knowledge and STEM fascination. These positive results demonstrate potential for replication for informal education programs.