The Exploratorium's Learning Studio blog | A workshop for tinkering with technology, science, and art » training

Marble Machines – training with the Explainers

Luigi — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:44:57 +0000

As has become a sort of yearly tradition, we hosted a three-hour training with the new batch of Field Trip Explainers, who will be starting to work on the museum floor in a couple of weeks. This is a particularly fun and creative group to work with: their ideas are always clever, the mood happy, and the insights that transpire in the “debriefing” session afterward always worth listening to and taking note of.

Click on the image below to be taken to a gallery of their work and creations:

And here’s a sweet video of their wonderful contraptions:

Chain reaction videos: explainer style!

Luigi — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:12:22 +0000

As promised, here are two videos showing the contraptions built by the explainers during their training with us. Cool stuff!

Chain Reaction training

Luigi — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:03:59 +0000

In preparation for the upcoming Maker Faire booth, in which we will be hosting a community-built chain reaction event, we had the pleasure of trying out the activity with the Exploratorium explainers. Due to their busy schedule and the need to have the museum floor staffed, we had to split the workshop in two days, with half the explainers doing the activity on one day, and the other half on the next.

In this activity, we will ask participants to build a section of a collective chain reaction; each section will then join with and trigger the next one, so that at the end of a building session, we will be able to set the contraption off at one end, and it will work its way (flawlessly, I’m sure!) to the end.

As always, the depth of thought and care that this group of educators brings to any activity they participate in shined through, both in the actual construction of the chain reaction elements, and in the discussion we had afterwards.

Now we are definitely looking forward to Maker Faire in a month!

Here are some photographs from both days:

Click image for Day 1 gallery!

Click image for Day 2 gallery!