Monthly Archives: May 2018

A group of museums is conducting research on informal science institutions and escape rooms experiences. An escape room is an increasingly popular physical adventure game in which players are “locked” in a room and as a team must solve a series of puzzles to “escape” the room. The purpose of this survey is to the gauge the level of interest among the informal science education community in pop-up escape room experiences that would engage visitors in a group problem-solving activity while teaching basic, NGSS-aligned science content. This survey should only take a few minutes to complete and should cause no more [...]

Are you interested in starting a conversation about climate change in your community? On April 18th, NOVA aired its newest climate change documentary, Decoding the Weather Machine. This two hour special takes a deep dive into our climate machine to explain why scientists agree that our climate is changing, how climate change will impact our daily lives, and how we can be resilient—and even thrive—in the face of this enormous change. We are looking for partners across the country that are interested in bringing a screening of Decoding the Weather Machine to their community. NOVA will provide your school or organization [...]

In our most recent family science program, we featured owl pellet dissection. This allowed for hands on science exploration for youth in grades K-5 with a grownup using tools and resources to mimic scientists in the field. Here’s what we did. Program supplies included hand wipes, tweezers, pencils and plastic jars with lids. We ordered barn owl pellets from a science supplies distributor via Amazon. We learned that barn owl populations are on a decline so we limited our program to use 12 pellets, for a total of 12 children plus their adult caregiver. From previous programs, we had [...]