Exploratorium Museum, Here I Come!
Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA 94123, www.exploratorium.edu, 415-561-0385, develop@exploratorium.edu
By Jeffrey Paul Oakar
San Francisco is a legendary city and famous for many things. In fact, if there were ever a World Olympics for best cities, the City by the Bay would surely be our city to take the last shot as time is winding down. Mention San Francisco and many images come to mind: Bright sunny days on the Golden Gate bridge, cable cars, snaky Lombard street, Alcatraz, fog and hippies. Maybe you’re thinking about the politics of the city, left-wing, liberal and sometimes radical. Jack Kerouac, the Beats, Chinatown, the culture, food, the physical beauty of the bay. The list is endless and these images have become so famous that they’ve become cliché. Well it’s time to add another to the list. The Exploratorium Museum may be quite simply the best hands-on science museum in the world and a big reason to visit the city!
If you are a homeschooler, the museum may be the number one reason to visit. If this sounds like an exaggeration, take a look at what others have said about the Exploratorium. According to the American Association of Museums, no other place has had more influence over other museums than the Exploratorium. Newsweek recently declared that the museum is the standard by which all others should be measured. For parents interested in science, here is your Mecca.
But when we mention this great science museum, we really have to mention the whole Exploratorium experience. If you are planning on visiting the city, a trip to the museum will reward you with a plethora of “Core Exhibits” which have been researched and developed after years of studies. There are more than 650 in-house exhibits at any one time and cover such topics as human perception, biology, medicine, anthropology, chemistry, physics and ecology. Other subjects include the exploration of light, weather, electricity and frequency waves. Besides these core exhibitions, the museum welcomes temporary community programs and artists-in-residence projects. Actually, one of the great things about the Exploratorium team is that they constantly strive to keep the museum experience fresh by devising new displays and exhibitions, or by conjuring up ways to revise and update the older core exhibits. One new show titled Traits of Life featured microscopic viewing and examined the common traits that all living organisms share. Mind is another display recently developed and delves into the way people perceive, think, feel, and understand the world around them and explores the connection of our perceptions and the decisions we make in our everyday life.
If you can’t make it to the museum any time soon, pay attention to the traveling displays that the Exploratorium sends out to other learning establishments. According to the official Exploratorium press release, the Traits of Life exhibit should make its way to nine different sites by the end of 2007. Finally, one of the best ways to get a flavor of what the Exploratorium is about is a visit to the website (www.exploratorium.edu). Whether you have the time to make a trip to the physical museum or not, this award-winning site is a must and will keep you and your child occupied for hours, with over 15,000 pages of experiment ideas and information. Occasionally, the site will feature live web-casts from far-off and distant places like Antarctica, or will broadcast events like a solar eclipse or an exploration to Mars. The site has so many interactive, hands-on activities that it might be impossible to tear your kids away from the computer screen.
In fact, what makes the Exploratorium the ideal learning playground for homeschoolers is the fact that the emphasis of the exhibits is hands on, interactive science experiments that are not only exciting, but encourage your children to inquire and discover. Tom Rockwell, Director of Public Relations and a homeschooling dad himself, believes that one important aspect of the Exploratorium experience is that the exhibits have been designed to keep children engaged for long periods of time. “The reason why this happens is first because there are so many stations available for the kids to use,” he said. “But what happens is they get to control the variables, which in turn promotes a sequence of inquiry, which invariably begs the question ‘what if?’” Children also have an incredible amount of freedom to vary their experiences, which also generates questions that can be solved by themselves as they experiment more and more with a particular activity. The bottom line for homeschoolers is that the Exploratorium Museum generates self-directed inquiry and discovery between the exhibits, the learner and the parents, as well.
Rockwell also encourages parents to make their needs known through feedback either at the museum itself, or on the website. The institution has already held special classes for parents to help facilitate the learning experience and strives to create new and innovative activities to keep interest going. For example, a new “Outdoor Exploratorium” program has been launched recently to get people out of the physical museum and into the streets of the city. One activity has groups going on city walks and deciphering the special symbols that utility companies place on the ground. Called “Underground City”, the purpose of the walk is to get people to think about how an actual city operates its water, gas, cable, internet and communications systems. Another outside activity was set up on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Special eye scopes with filters were set up along the water, and people could look through them to observe the reflections and how these patterns vary with the play of the light. Visitors could change the angle of the eye pieces to see just how light interacts with water. Similar exhibits were set up to observe the color of the sky as well and to observe just how many shades of blue you will find on any particular sunny day.
The Exploratorium has been especially involved in community work and has been a big participator in contributing to middle and high school science and math programs. Through its Teacher Institute program, the museum has created a one-of-a-kind teacher-induction program that takes in 35 new teachers who are dedicated to inquiry-based science instruction in the classroom. Homeschooling parents haven’t been ignored. The museum occasionally sets up outreach programs for homeschooling parents. These programs were specifically created to mentor parents on what they can do in the home to get their children involved in science. The parents attended workshops and were shown various techniques to not only encourage and support the questions their children might ask, but also to guide them into asking certain types of questions that lead to more action on the part of the child. The objective was to help parents get their children beyond the “Why is the sky blue?” question and more into the “What would happen if we did this?” inquiry. For more information about family-based programs, consult the website under the public programs and calendar sections.
Finally, it is important to mention that the Exploratorium is a leader in science-oriented publications with over 35 titles in print. One of the most exciting events of last year was the announcement of a wonderfully family-friendly science reference book, Exploratopia. The idea of the book is to give parents and kids easy and fun ways to explore the science they encounter in their everyday life. The great thing about the book is that it makes it easy for parents to spend quality time with the kids while exploring the science in their very own backyard. Handsomely illustrated, it is filled with mini-experiments and special research materials.
