The Exploratorium

Mission Statement

The Exploratorium is a museum of science, art and human perception founded in 1969. The Exploratorium's mission is to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them.

Collections

Developed in-house through extensive research and development, well more than 1,000 Exploratorium exhibits, with over 400 currently on view, have been designed to spark curiosity, regardless of age or familiarity with science. Exhibits cover a range of subject areas, including human perception (such as vision, hearing, learning and cognition), the life sciences and physical phenomena (such as light, motion, electricity, waves and resonance, and weather).

Programs

• The Exploratorium Teacher Institute (TI) has been a professional home for middle and high school science teachers for over twenty years. The TI offers a rich mix of hands-on activities based on Exploratorium exhibits, content-based discussions, classroom materials, web-based teaching resources, and machine shop
• The Institute for Inquiry (IFI) ©, was one of the five National Science Foundation-designated centers for accelerating science education reform nationwide. It works with elementary school teachers, administrators and district leaders from around the country and Latin America in a range of workshops and institutes designed to help districts implement inquiry-based education as a part of their standards-based reform efforts.
• The Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), a partnership of the Exploratorium with the King's College London and the University of California Santa Cruz, conducts research on informal learning, the informal science education infrastructure, and the connections between in- and out-of-school science learning.
• The Educational Outreach Program partners with more than 30 community organizations to bring free hands-on art and science programs to schools, community centers, children's hospitals and after-school programs.
• The Explainer Program, a prototype for museums internationally, hires and trains up to 75 high school students annually. The program combines on-the-job experience and academic instruction to encourage them to explore, teach and learn.
• The Field Trip Program provides online resources for teachers and on-site Explainers to facilitate visits and conduct demonstrations.
• The Exploratorium Artist-In-Residence Program is multidisciplinary in nature and includes a research and development process that may result in temporal works (such as performances, films and videos, workshops, or public presentations) as well as artworks and installations that may become part of the museum's regular collection.

A wide variety of public programs, artists-in-residence projects, and demonstrations accompany all exhibit collections and special exhibitions.

Exhibitions

Exploratorium Geometry Playground Opens June 25—September 6, 2010 Then Travels Nationally

Developed by the Exploratorium over the past three years, Geometry Playground includes over twenty exhibits and specially commissioned artworks and an eight-part summer film series. Geometry Playground should change the way you think about geometry, letting you touch and play with what for most has been only a textbook subject. It then travels to St. Paul, San Diego, and to other cities nationally. It is made possible by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Research

Currently, the Visitor Research and Evaluation Department is studying the effects of large-scale immersive exhibits on visitors' learning experiences. Do immersive exhibits from our Geometry Playground exhibition foster more engagement, spatial reasoning, and positive attitudes about geometry than non-immersive geometry exhibits?