The year two-thousand and fifteen was a HUGE one for the Digital Learning program at the California Academy of Sciences. We’ve had a lot of changes, pivots, sad goodbyes, and successes over the past twelve months that are important to acknowledge. Farewell, Christine / Welcome, Jeff! Over the summer, we bid a fond farewell to …
See Frosty and Holiday, two actual reindeer at the California Academy of Sciences through the month of December.
Okay, it took awhile to get out episode three of our podcast "Object Oriented," but we are pretty excited about this one. In this episode, Eve, Barry and tackle one of the most exciting new trends in museums and other learning institutions: the Maker Movement. I begin with the basic but complicated question of whether …
Check out this neat video portrait of Moises Bernal, one our of ichthyologists (fish biologists) at the California Academy of Sciences. Lots of neat details about what he gets to do as a scientist at the Academy, what makes his job fun, and why he does it. "When you go to the field and you …
I'm excited to share the news that the Cal Academy's award-winning planetarium show "Habitat Earth" is now available free-of-charge for educators to use in their classrooms. This 25-minute planetarium dome show has been re-mastered as an HD video that can be downloaded and shown to students as part of their lessons on biodiversity, food systems, …
San Francisco is a world-class city in so many ways, including our over-abundance of amazing cultural institutions. We have not one, but TWO amazing science museums — the California Academy of Sciences and the Exploratorium. And we have a rich variety of art museums, including the DeYoung, the Legion of Honor, the Asian Art Museum, and …
For the next few days, I am in lovely Montreal, Canada for the annual conference of the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC). ASTC is basically the annual geek-fest for science museum professionals. This is my fourth ASTC, and for once I am attending simply as a participant. In past years, I’ve presented, …
This weekend was the first national Climate Game Jam, happening at sites all around the country. For us, it was a super fun and inspiring two days of game hacking, science exploration, and team building, all to educate young people about climate change, and what they can do about it. The Climate Game Jam was …
The Field Museum of Chicago is one of my favorite natural history museums in the world. The Field is one of the country's oldest natural history museums, dating back to 1893, as an outgrowth of the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. Those deep roots are evident in the neo-classical architecture, old school dioramas, and …
If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an educator, it’s that you can only be a jerky foreman to your youth miners for so long before they fight back. But I’m getting ahead of myself in the story… Back in 2009, I was in one of the principal educators running “I Dig Zambia.” “I Dig Zambia” …