I'm old enough to remember "Powers of Ten" (1977), a formative and mind-expanding film that was shown to millions of young people in the 70s and 80s. It depicts in stunning animations for time the scale of the universe, starting from a person laying down at a picnic, then zooming out to the edge of the …
For the final day of the TechTeens program last Saturday, I had my group of teens play the game "Spaceteam" together for the first time. It's one of my favorite games ever, and seeing them so delighted to play it together was wonderful to witness. "Asteroid! Flip!"
I’m so proud of my TechTeens at the California Academy of Sciences for completing their last “Do Now” science blog post of the year on a really cool and fun topic: “Are robots taking our jobs?” Check out the hilarious video produced by the KQED education team, featuring TechTeens Sophie and Alex! Then read the …
What would happen if you let 40 teens spend the weekend at your museum and challenged them to create digital games on complex sustainability topics? That's what we wanted to find out, so we organized the Science Game Jam last month. Over the weekend of April 24-25 at the California Academy of Sciences, nine teams of …
It took us awhile to get out our fourth episode, but we are happy to share with you "Object Oriented" #4: the Museums and the Web edition! Barry, Eve and I happened to be in the same place at the same time for the Museums and the Web conference in LA a few weeks ago. …
My co-workers surprised me with this on my desk this morning. Awww. It's nice working with a program with such nice swag.
Today my colleague Andrew dug up this old Science Action Club tee-shirt for me, back from 2012. Any ideas why we don't use this graphic anymore?
I’m excited to announce that I will soon be taking on a newly created role at the Academy, the Senior Instructional Design Lead for Science Action Club. This is a new position working with our largest youth program, the Science Action Club (SAC), a high-impact STEM learning program that designs professional development and teaching kits for middle school afterschool …
Just a teaser that on Monday I have some exciting news about my new role at the California Academy of Sciences. Meanwhile, here's a video of one of our biologists introducing our Digital Learning TechTeens to a Giant Pacific Octopus under our care.
I have been helping lead one of our teen project groups for the internship program at the Academy. Project groups are opportunities for our interns to work together on some longer term project or topic, supported by a staff person, over the course of a semester. My project group is called “Big History”, a group of five teens …