Musings on Dance, Food, Geek Stuff
I was watching the latest musical episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, in which one of the principal characters, Nyota Uhura, considers what her role is on the starship Enterprise. It’s a banger of a number and the actress Celia Rose Gooding kills it. It hit me right in the feels, not only because…
Ms. Millar After math class, you took me aside and said,“You don’t belong here.”I agreed. But how did you know? I’d always felt like the outsider –Too small, too odd, too yellow.A defective droid. You said, “You don’t belong here.You should be in advanced algebra.” I didn’t believe you.It took a couple more decadesTo see…
Hey, it’s International Women’s Day! There are so many influential women who have nurtured and supported me over the years. Today I wanted to uplift my middle school math teacher Ms. Millar. To be honest, I don’t remember much about Ms. Millar, other than she was a kind, sweet, older white lady that taught 6th…
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…
It’s stuff like that that reminds me why I have the best job ever. Just for fun, a group of our summer TechTeens 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 and playing, and…
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…
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.
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 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…
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…