One of the awesome out-of-the-way spots that I got to visit in the Philippines in April was the small island of Isla Verde (Verde Island) in Batangas Province. I was there along with a team of educators and scientists to do an outreach to the local community about their local marine biodiversity and how to safeguard…
Category: Education
Three Variations on the Game “Ninja” by Cal Academy Teens
It's stuff like that that reminds me why I have the best job ever. Just for fun, a group of our summer Digital Learning teens 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…
Teens Learn Citizen Science, Create Digital Games on Mt. Tam
A couple of years ago, I led a summer camp for middle schoolers called the "Pearson Young Scientists" at the California Academy of Sciences. It was a super fun program to develop and facilitate, taking a group of a dozen middle schoolers from the Bay Area and exposing them to citizen science, local parks, and…
No Kid Is More Baller than This Kid
Check out this awesome kid in this photo from a Wall Street Journal article on the "Edible Schoolyard" project. No, seriously, check him out! Awesome tee-shirt: CHECK. Attitude: CHECK. Chicken: CHECK.
Irish and Bay Area Kids Learn to Code Together at the Cal Academy
On Thursday, the California Academy of Sciences hosted a fun coding workshop for middle schoolers that I helped facilitate. The occasion was the visit of five young programmers from Cork, Ireland to the Bay Area, along with the Deputy Lord Mayor of Cork, and various other dignitaries from Ireland. The sponsoring organization was called CoderDojo,…
“This Connected Life” : Fostering Youth Voice in Local Learning Networks (video)
This past weekend, I had the honor of MCing a fun panel discussion among educators in three locales in the US on the topic of fostering youth voice in local learning networks. If you are a local educator and looking for ways to better serve your youth community, I recommend that you check out the…
Five Things Museums Can Learn from Disneyland
In the museum and informal science education field we often place ourselves in opposition to amusement parks and theme parks. My own museum's ED has said to our staff, "we have no pirates" in our museum. From a certain perspective I think that makes sense. Amusement parks as private ventures have as their primary mandate…
The Cal Academy’s Elizabeth Babcock on Digital Learning
I love this interview with the Cal Academy's head of public engagement and education Elizabeth Babcock on the website "Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning." Elizabeth speaks eloquently about the bigger vision of injecting digital learning into this august science institution: Basically when I came, I had a vision of a digital learning department with…
“The Kepler Story”: An Expansive One-Man Play Set in the World’s Largest Digital Dome
Last night I was fortunate enough to catch one of the few performances of "The Kepler Story" at the California Academy of Sciences, a one-man play about the astounding life of one of mankind's greatest astronomers Johannes Kepler. I found the story of Kepler's many struggles as a Christian, a mathematician, astronomy and a father to…
Talking about Mobile Games, Space Shows and Raising Digital Teens at ASTC This Weekend
For the next four days, I will be in lovely Albuquerque, New Mexico for the annual Association of Science and Technology Centers conference (ASTC), along with 2,000 or so of my colleagues from other science centers, natural history museums, and other science institutions. It’s a really neat event, showcasing some of the best research, most…