Two thousand and sixteen was a big year for me at the California Academy of Sciences. Lots of pivots, adventures and new beginnings! Here’s some of the highlights. The biggest news was my transfer in the Spring from Digital Learning over the Science Action Club team. Shifting from managing my own youth program to being part …
A couple of years ago, I met Simone Giertz, a young Swedish woman interested in lindy hop and making electronic gadgets. That's three things that I love in one person: dancing lindy hop! making electronic gadgets! being Swedish! Chatting with Simone at a lindy hop social, I mentioned that I worked at a science museum and …
A couple of weeks ago, we got the official word on the phasing out of the MacArthur Foundation's support for Digital Media and Learning. While this was not terribly surprising for those of us who have been in the field and paying attention, it still is a major shift in our community. Barry Joseph on …
Answer: I watch Brain Scoop videos all day, obviously. As a youth educator who runs after-school programs, I sometimes get asked by our teens what I do when I’m not teaching. Or as Ellie, one of our summer TechTeens asked me, “What do you do all day when we’re not here?” It’s a legit …
One of the buzzwords we use a lot in Cal Academy youth programs is “pivoting.“ To pivot is a necessary and even welcome part of the process of working with youth. “Pivoting” is a term borrowed from business, and in particular tech companies, to describe how a firm can rapidly shift strategy or even entire product …
Tonight I had the pleasure of visiting the amazing maker space at the software design company Autodesk on Pier 9, San Francisco. I was participating in a Bay Area Maker Educator meetup, along with 40 other teachers and education specialists from across the Bay. The invitation promised a visit to a maker lab that “we’ll all …
The New Learning Times, a publication of the Teachers College at Columbia University, did a nice profile about me recently. I’ve reprinted some it below. See the complete piece by George Nantwi at their site. How did your educational trajectory and past professional experience shape your current work? I have a wide-ranging and circuitous educational …
Check out this great blog post by Chanun, one of our TASC Force youth volunteers, about his experience participating in a “youth civic hackathon” at TechShop San Francisco this past weekend. Chanun writes eloquently about what he and two other Academy youth did and learned over the course of the weekend. “My teammates and I …
One of my favorite finds at the Walt Disney Family Museum yesterday was this flow chart of a Disney animated film, created in 1943 as part of an employee handbook for their Burbank studios. I love how it details the relationships among all the of the hundreds of people involved in a film production, from …
It’s stuff like that that reminds me why I have the best job ever. Just for fun, a group of our summer TechTeens at the California Academy of Sciences created different variations on the popular kids game “Ninja” (or “Ultimate Ninja”). It started as a lunchtime activity to get them physically interacting and playing, and …