Quick, picture DNA. Chances are you’ll call to mind a diagram you’ve seen meant to represent this microscopic ‘blueprint of life:” twin helixes running in opposite directions and connected by horizontal bars.
But what if you’ve never seen such a diagram, and indeed never will? What if the sense upon which so much of science teaching […]

When Michael Edwards moved from Aberdeen, Scotland, to New Brunswick, Canada, he intended to earn a PhD in biology. But he had to abandon that plan when he developed an allergy to the potato beetles he was working with.
The doctoral program’s loss was informal science’s gain; reasoning that he had enjoyed the teaching aspect of […]

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 […]

Have you been meaning to create some simple videos, maybe to illustrate your favorite hands-on science activity?
If you already have a high-end digital video camera, professional backdrops and lighting, and FinalCut pro, you can stop reading right now.
But what if you don’t have any of that equipment, and still want to make some stop action […]

With free tools like Google Earth and mapbuilder so widely available, these days it seems that everyone’s a mapmaker.
But mapping data to location in an effort to reveal previously unseen connections—now that’s a taller order.
(To introduce learners to the concept, howtosmile.org’s data mapping activities are a good place to start.)
An excellent example of the power […]

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 […]

At an unassuming table in an unremarkable exhibit hall, sandwich bags filled with tongue depressors and rubber bands were an unexpectedly hot item.
The conference was the recent 2010 annual meeting of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) in Honolulu. The table showcased howtosmile.org, the newly launched math and science portal for informal educators.
And the sandwich […]

What do inline skates, CDs, Frisbees, and even the clothes you wear have in common? On a Thursday in late August, science educator Cassie Byrd (pictured) put the question to the homeschooled girls participating in the Exploratorium’s Girls’ Science Institute.
The answer, of course, is polymers. Cassie explained how she chose […]

Ask Suzy Gurton, Education Manager at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, about hands-on astronomy, and you’ll be disabused of any notion that studying the cosmos need be a solely intellectual pursuit.
She’ll remind you that building your own telescope is very hands-on, as is experimenting with colored filters and simple spectroscopes to understand how images […]

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 […]