Explainers in Egypt

by Anne

This weekend, Aiona and I went to a new museum in Qanater, Egypt to lead Explainer training.  This is the first time that they’ve used hands-on exhibits, and they’re expecting it to be the first time for their visiting school groups as well.  They are are extremely excited about this new museum and are looking forward to bringing some fun and excitement into science learning.  Here’s a peek at what we did:

Explainers discussing strategies for helping students make careful observations at Turbulent Orb

Explainers racing various balls down gravity well and explaining their questions and discoveries to each other

Exploring lenses and prisms outside in the sunlight

Using the "Tools for Exploration" from Exploratopia to investigate bubble shapes

Fog Haikus

by Sylvia

Training this April was a little foggy- fog exhibits, fog in a bottle, laminar v turbulent flow, fog and cloud(less) observations, and…

FOG HAIKUS. We created these poems in small groups by brainstorming words that we associate with fog. Then we shuffled them around like magnetic poetry until we were happy with the poem.

Some of the poems about weather related exhibits.
Can you guess which exhibits they are?

soft sky fly(ing) by
crawling explosive Bay fog
creep heavy weather

surrounding color
mesmerizing turbulence
blue swirls, spin wildly

fog swirls purple sky
coldness and water combine
crash connect collide

Bike to Work Day

by Ann Bartkowski

For most of the Explainers, every day is bike to work day (kind of like every day is Earth Day…) but today we actually celebrated it! We celebrated with an early morning feast in the presidio followed by a bike race to work. Because we are so photogenic, we decided to take some artistic shots of ourselves in the museum before the visitors arrived (we didn’t want to break frank’s only rule: no riding bikes in the museum when it’s open to visitors). here are our submissions to the bike to work day photo contest. will we win one of the five prizes (aka t-shirts)?! and if we do, who will wear the shirt first?!  one of the Psychedelic Legends? or one of the Assassin Caterpillars?!

Never Lost

by ryan

Seems like with the Google liquid galaxy that was recently taken off the floor, the Polynesian navigation event last week, and the directions from the internet to the party in the presidio on the explainer lounge table,  there have been a lot of talk about maps and map making around the museum lately.

Ann and I have also been interested in exploring things to do for outdoor demos and the spontaneous creation of personalized maps might be a interesting path to go down.

I was reading an article the other day that I wanted to post here about how homemade maps are often better than the ones that we print out on the internet because they reveal specific information to a specific audience.

Hand-Drawn Maps…

Anne was talking about someone who she listened to on ‘this american life’ who made maps of his whole neighborhood that each displayed a different aspect of the area. I really like this one of stars seen from a specific intersection.

Here’s the link to Episode #110 (mapping)

It seems that its all about noticing the world around you in different ways. Maybe we could do this with the exploratorium. Josue’s stool stalking scheme anyone?

Google Earth

by Ann Bartkowski

I won’t miss feeling motion sick or feeling stupid for not being able to find my college (either Maine terrain is legitimately confusing or 4 years of my life didn’t happen), but I will miss playing with this large-scale Google Earth everyday! I love hearing visitor’s and other staff’s personal stories about places they hailed from or traveled to. Here’s a vid of Paul D. narrating his trip to Antarctica for us!