Ingredients: graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate, SUN!
With the days getting longer until June 21 (the summer solstice), there’s plenty of sun for solar fun. One recipe for sweet solar success (now or this summer) is melting s’mores in a Solar Oven —no campfire needed!
A cardboard-box solar oven that you make yourself, placed in a very sunny […]

Q: What started Jim Stofan on the path of science education that eventually landed him at the DC headquarters of the country’s premier space agency?
A: The story begins with a bang–and a tweet.
From a young age, Jim was fascinated with rockets. But it was a seed-eating songbird that first sparked his interest in science.
Now NASA’s […]

On November 5, 2008, a few days after Barack Obama was elected president, Daniel Edelson wrote an open letter to the man who would soon occupy the White House.
Edelson, National Geographic’s Vice President of Education, delivered an eloquent plea, asking that the new administration “take up the cause of geographic education.”
“The U.S. has done a […]

When astronomer Isabel Hawkins was growing up in Argentina, an encyclopedia salesman showed up at the door one day with an illustrated book about the planets.
“There was this one picture of Jupiter” says Isabel, “floating in the blackness of space. It was that image, of this mysterious planet, this exotic world surrounded in blackness, that […]

Educator Cheryl McCallum talks about one of her favorite SMILE outdoor activities, and how to make it work even if you don’t have “an outdoor space teeming with living things.”
These days, I work in a museum. But before that I was an “outdoor educator,” taking 5th graders on hikes through the East Texas Piney […]

I still remember when my sixth grade science teacher took us outside, gave us each a block of wood and a magnifying glass, and showed us how to harness the sun’s energy to burn our zodiac sign into wood.
Sure, the zodiac thing dates me (I’m a Cancer, an unfortunately named sign if there ever was […]