Exploratorium — the museum of science, art and human perception
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- K–12
- Subjects
- science (astronomy, biology and life science, chemistry, geology, meteorology, space exploration, technology & innovation), second languages (general)
- Provider
- The Exploratorium
- Special requirements
- Quicktime, Shockwave, and RealAudio are needed for the exhibits.
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
This is the homepage for San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum. At this website you will find a variety of interactive, multimedia exhibits that incorporate hands-on activities, audio, video, images, and webcasts. These exhibits will teach you and your students about such topics as satellites, astronomy, the Earth, machines, biology, languages, the human body, and lots more.
This website is sure to make learning and teaching science fun. Students can map sunspots, make their own telescope, electrify a pickle, make a mummy, or craft homemade paper. There are more than 15,000 pages and instructions for over 500 experiments on this site which is “an extension of the experiences on the museum's floor.” Many exhibits use Shockwave, Flash, QuickTime VR, and other technologies. Webcasting is the newest technology used by the site, which allows live video or audio broadcasts from the museum or out in the field. In this way, scientists, special events, and interesting people or locations can be brought to classrooms in real time.
Students will enjoy the Explore page with its special exhibits. Here they will find information about global warming, cooking, robots, biodiversity, and sports science. Each of the exhibits has experiments to promote better understanding of the subject. For instance, the Accidental Scientist – Science of Cooking has recipes and activities with eggs, a microscopic tour of bread, fermentation of food and pickle making, the molecular art of grilling and more.
Educator's guide
The Educators section is full of great ideas for using the Exploratorium website in the classroom. The hands-on activity section has a large range of activities which can be used in conjunction with the student’s Explore page. These activities are wonderful for teaching Earth science, chemistry, biology, physics, and social studies curricula.
“Science Snacks are miniature versions of some of the most popular exhibits at the Exploratorium.” Included are instructions for building these exhibits. Teachers can search the “snacks” by subject or browse the A-Z list of exhibits. Included is a “Snack Supplies ” area with a collection of resources and links to providers for hard- to-find items to use in the exhibits.
The Exploratorium Digital Library has “ digital media and digitized museum materials related to interactive exhibits and scientific phenomena, including images, educational activities in PDF and html formats, QuickTime movies, streaming media, and audio files.” Search the collection of learning resources, explore the archive of webcasts, and view the special collections.
Check out the Internet2 Gateway. Advanced network applications using Abilene, a high-performance computer network, allow teachers to view high-resolution images and DVD-quality videos on the Microscope Imaging Station. There are also Webcasts such as the recent total solar eclipse seen from Turkey.
