Engineering Greater Understanding
Science and math are keys to grasping how our everyday world is built — and how to redesign it.
 |
| Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director, Museum of Science, Boston |
With 1.5 million visitors a year, the Museum of Science in Boston is New England’s most-attended cultural institution. We’re one of the largest science centers in the world, known for our more than 700 hands-on exhibits, our Butterfly Garden, Charles Hayden Planetarium, and 180-degree domed IMAX Mugar Omni Theater.
What’s less well known is that the Museum of Science is also a leader in fostering technological literacy through museums and in schools nationwide. We’re helping to inspire the nation’s next generation of technological innovators and entrepreneurs. And we’re helping equip millions of people with the knowledge and skills they will need to fully benefit from — and make wise decisions about — the increasingly powerful technological tools that are becoming ever most essential and invaluable in all of our lives.
Traditionally, science museums have focused on the natural world — on fossils and animals and other marvels of the earth and stars. Our institution, founded in 1830 as the Boston Society of Natural History, is rooted in this tradition. But if science museums now limited themselves to the natural world, as amazing and precious as it is, they would risk becoming fossils themselves.
Today, 90 percent of most people’s time and attention is devoted to interacting with the human-made world. Understanding it is fundamental; technological literacy is basic literacy. The way to make science and mathematics relevant to today’s young people, particularly, is through engineering — exploring how science and math are applied to create technologies and the rest of the human-made world that young people interact with every day.
Four years ago, the Museum of Science created the National Center for Technological Literacy (NCTL) to enhance knowledge of engineering and technology for people of all ages. Through the NCTL, we have developed an elementary school engineering curriculum that has reached more than 190,000 students in 46 states. We’ve also successfully field-tested engineering courses for middle schools and high schools.
We offer many workshops to help educators integrate engineering into the classroom. We are also developing a new generation of highly interactive museum exhibits and programs that will inspire people to become technologically literate through experiences of science as, first and foremost, an activity.
For example, the Museum’s summer science program offers more than 80 hands-on classes where students in grades 1 through 10 can tinker with robots, learn the science of baseball, build their own solar cooker, and much more. Again this summer, dozens of economically disadvantaged students in Boston and Cambridge will be able to attend these classes, thanks to the Young Innovators Scholarship fund that Microsoft established at the Museum.
Such partnerships are helping us demonstrate the excitement and relevance of science, engineering and technology in daily life. Behind the scenes, in ways not always apparent to visitors, the Museum of Science and its partners are working to help drive innovation and nurture understanding.
