Corn Surprise!

by Ann Bartkowski

No, it’s not today’s lunch club- it’s what we got during our fruit dissection today with Karen! When Lianna and I took on the challange of dissecting an ear of corn, we didn’t realize we were biting off more than we could chew. When we were shucking the corn, we found something unusual…never before seen in Explainer training (even by Karen who has seen a lot)! We found an undeveloped mini-corn-on-the-cob inside the green, leafy part next to the fully developed ear of corn! It was a-MAIZE-ing! Here are some photos:

We were all ears to hear Karen’s ideas of what this could be. After a chat with her, our theory is that the silky parts of the corn are the stigmas (female part) that contain a tube for the pollen to travel down to fertilize the eggs. Because the silk strands from this tiny corn were enveloped by the green husk no pollen was able to get to them. We believe what these photos show are lots of little unfertilized corn eggs, which do not taste as delicious as grown-up corn kernels.

Sorry if this post was too corny for you!

Language, Gender, Directions and Explainer Training

by Ann Bartkowski

Lianna and I wanted to share this article with you that was published in the NY Times over the summer. It’s so relevant! (to what we have been talking about today and yesterday in trainings)

There is a section about nouns with genders in different languages that came up during our philosophy discussion yesterday about gender. There is also a part about people who use directions (such as north, south, east, west) instead of saying “left hand, right leg, in front of me, behind you”, etc. Robert and I were talking about this part of the article during our North-Finding activities outside today.

NY Times Article on Language

Happy Reading! If you’re super interested, it’s part of a real book by Guy Deutscher called “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages” that was published this summer. Book Club, perhaps?

How many exhibits can you fit in one four minute music video?

by lianna

In the jungle that YouTube can sometimes be, I stumbled across this video a few months ago and found it fascinating.  Since then I have returned to it several times, not because the song is anything special, but because the video itself is so fun to watch.

It’s fun to see the exhibits that are so familiar to us presented in such a different way.  And that got me thinking, exactly how many exhibits are in that video?  At first I thought that would be easy to figure out — watch and count.  But how do you decide which illusions count?  Ones that are related to exhibits?  Ones that are identical to exhibits?  What about the ones that used to be on the floor and aren’t anymore?  And how many times did the team in white bounce the ball? (just kidding…)

So I propose a challenge to all you explainers out there.  Watch it and count up how many exhibits you see.  Then we can compare answers!  I’d love to hear your perspective on it.

Mystical Fog Movie

by ryan

Since the last two in-depth training topics in explainer land were size and scale and fog, I just had to go ahead and retweet Luigi’s blog post on the learning studio blog about a beautiful timelapse fog video. Enjoy!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15069551?byline=0&portrait=0

Mistake Garden

by Aiona

Last week a very old friend of mine came to visit and I showed him my garden. “It doesn’t look like much” I said, “but that’s just because I don’t really know anything about gardening, and I decided to just plant however it made sense to me and then learn from my mistakes.” He looked at me with a look of utter shock. “But you used to be the one who never made mistakes.”

And I didn’t have a garden back then either, and wouldn’t have planted one unless I was sure I could keep everything alive. This conversation reminded me of something very very important I learned from being an Explainer, that the deepest learning happens when you just try something, without being sure of the outcome. And if you live this way you have to be okay with your plants not always surviving, and your bread not always rising, and making a lot of mistakes sometimes. It took me awhile for my ego to be okay with that, but now it seems so second nature I forgot for a moment that I used to be otherwise. Thank you Explainers for teaching me how to mess up.

Fall 2010 Explainer Year Hopes

by Ann Bartkowski

To kick off the 2010 Explainer Year, we began by compiling some of our many hopes and dreams for the upcoming year.  Above is one explainer’s visual representation of what he hopes will happen this year.  Read the list below to get insight into what the explainers hope to help people to achieve this year:

I hope to help visitors…

…get interested in something new to them, and try to get someone else interested as well.

…take ownership of their experiences and have courage to follow their passions.

…be empowered and inspired to ask questions about the world around them.

…do something thing they thought would never be possible to do in a museum, like bang on an exhibit just to see what it sounds like!

…realize that they can be responsible for learning things that interest them.  They can follow their own passions.

…be inspired (and to support those who are already inspired) to explore the world.

…understand at least one concept, but also to fully enjoy themselves that they’ll want to come back.

…experience wonder and excitement that will stay with them in their everyday life.

…know that it is OK to be curious — that it is quite cool actually!

…walk away having had a rich experience — full of experimentation, newfound curiousities, and surprising discoveries.

…develop the ability to learn new knowledge for fun.

…come away from the museum with a deeper connection to perception and everything that means to them.

…discover the power of their own creative thinking and be inspired to bring it to experiences outside the museum.

…feel empowererd to learn more about the world around them, by playing, experiementing, and sharing what they noticed.

…gain a bit of curiosity about the world around them that they might not have been quite as in touch with before their visit.  I want them to leave with the idea that wonder is all around them if they choose to look for it.

…leave with more questions than they started with, and a sense they can find the answers themselves.

…will be amazed and have fun!

Sol Scale

by ryan

Check out this page with the relative size of objects in the universe. This reminded me of some of the activities that we do for explainer trainings, although we usually use physical objects to stand in for the size of planets. For some of the more zoomed out pictures we’d need wildly different materials like a grain of sand next to the tactile dome. It just might work.