The Site of Rik Panganiban
Last Saturday, youth participants at the Science Game Design Workshop completed and shared out their game prototypes: “Oil Spill!” and “Trash Island.” The youth had a great time iterating on their game designs, testing them out with other teens, and presenting their (nearly) finished products to aquarium biologist Pam and game designers Chris and Jeff from …
"Interstellar," the new scifi film directed by Christopher Nolan, explores a number of complex and fascinating scientific phenomena and concepts, including black holes, gravity, wormholes, a fifth dimension, and in particular Special Relativity. As a scifi buff, I found the movie to be very entertaining. And as a science educator, I thought that there …
I'm excited to share the news that the California Academy of Sciences has a acquired a state-of-the-art high resolution microscopic camera called the "Magnify2," created by the company GIGAMacro based in Napa, California. It looks, frankly, totally badass. The Magnify2 is billed as a "complete, high performance, precision robotic 3-axis linear motion control, image …
This morning I got up at 4am to catch the live broadcast by NASA of a spacewalk by astronauts Reid Wiseman and Barry Wilmore on the International Space Station. Their mission was to replace a malfunctioning "sequential shunt unit" that regulates electricity generated by one of the solar panels on the ISS. Sounds super boring, but …
The California Academy of Sciences invites high school students to participate in a Game Design Playshop on November 8th and November 15th. Ethicist Mark Budolfson and award-winning game designing Chris Bennett will lead teens in designing tabletop (board, card, dice) games around important, natural science issues like climate change and ecology. Students will combine science …
I'm so excited to return to the Association of Science and Technology Centers annual conference (ASTC), from October 17-19 in Raleigh, North Carolina! My youth programs team and I are involved in more sessions and panels than ever. Here's a quick snapshot of where you can find us at the Raleigh convention center. Date Title Time …
I got a new iThing so I decided to try out the timelapse video function on one of the simplest, and yet most attractive bit of technology we have at the California Academy of Sciences : Foucault's Pendulum. Foucault's Pendulum is found at science centers and museums around the world, since was first exhibited in …
My educator colleagues at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburg are in the midst of a minor internet brouhaha (see wonkette and jezebel) over some apparent disparities in their workshop offerings for Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, as exemplified by this image that has been making the rounds. Infuriating, right? Sexist, right? Well the story is a bit …
In case you didn't know the mermaid lifecycle, our Cal Academy TechTeens have made a handy infographic that explains it. Seems about right to me. #science
Check out this beautiful tape art that has been cropping up around the staff-side of my museum, the California Academy of Sciences. We are beginning a staff-wide, month-long solicitation for "Big Ideas" for the future direction of the Academy. This is by far the most creative response to the call for inspiring ideas. But …