Recent Blog Posts
Arkansas museums gather for tinkering
By Aiona Bones on February 5, 2012
The Exploratorium is working with museums across the state of Arkansas to create spaces for open ended making at the intersection of art, science, and technology. While the studios’ infrastructure is being sawed, drilled and bolted together in San Francisco, the folks in Arkansas have been just as busy preparing themselves to direct and facilitate [...]
Arkansas Takes On Tinkering
By Aiona Bones on January 25, 2012
Visitors wandered in to The Museum of Discovery’s new tinkering studio this month for the first time, some pulling rambunctiously on their parent’s shirt sleeves, while others poked around with tentative curiosity. Before long a young contingent had made the commitment to sit down and build something.
While the visitors tinkered, a small team of facilitators, [...]
Color Uncovered: The Exploratorium’s First iPad App Takes Off
By Aiona Bones on October 27, 2011
Color Uncovered, the Exploratorium’s very first iPad app, was released last week and was quickly downloaded by scores of curious users. It currently sits at #1 for free educational apps, much to the excitement of Exploratorium staff, who volleyed emails back and forth all week, keeping each other posted on its current rating as it [...]
The Passing of The Torch, The Exploratorium Gets New Explainers
By Aiona Bones on October 12, 2011
Here in San Francisco the rains have just started. That’s how I know that summer is officially over. The days are getting shorter, the tourists have gone home, the children have started school, and the rest of us have unpacked our rain gear. In the museum business this also means that field trip season is [...]
Prototyping New Ideas: Zoetrope and Cycloid Station
By Aiona Bones on September 12, 2011
ExNET has been working on designing two new activities for our traveling tinkering show, and I recently had the opportunity to join forces with the Exploratorium Tinkering Studio team to prototype them on the floor. It was both fun and profoundly useful to see them in action, and we’re planning on doing more prototyping together [...]
Giant lasers, super vacuums and the search for gravity waves
By Aiona Bones on August 11, 2011
Most ExNET exhibit sets can be found at science and discovery museums in the center of cities, but every rotation cycle we ship one set out to Louisiana, far from any large metropolis, to a very high tech research center hidden behind a tangle of dense wet forest. This is LIGO, a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave [...]
Student Made Exhibits
By Aiona Bones on August 3, 2011
A small group of teachers from High Tech High in San Diego have recently begun planning for an extraordinary student project. Starting next year, highschoolers in their classes will learn by creating their own interactive inquiry-driven exhibits, taking the entire semester to follow the project from beginning to end, picking up skills in inquiry, investigation, [...]
Meet The Explainers
By Aiona Bones on June 30, 2011
The Exploratorium’s High School Explainers have been working on documenting their experiences at the Exploratorium in a series of excellent short videos published online. Here’s a sampling of the first few. To see more check back with the Exploratorium’s Youtube channel throughout the summer.
Learning from Research
By Aiona Bones on June 15, 2011
While most science museum educators value the importance of scientific research in untangling and illuminating the world around us, it remains the case that research on informal learning itself is not widely read by the people in a position to put the research to use. I suspect one of the reasons for this is simply [...]
Working With Artists
By Aiona Bones on May 31, 2011
The mission of modern science museums is evolving. I hear more and more about the importance of deeply engaging visitors and communities, encouraging innovation, and fostering the development of process skills, skills like noticing, questioning and communicating new ideas. These skills are not unique to the sciences; they are the same skills that are fostered [...]