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Science-Rich Institutions Provide Venues for Exploration

Jackeli Queli views her multiplying faces inside a giant kaleidoscope during Family Science Night at the Explora Science Center in Albuquerque, N.M.

—Kitty Clark Fritz for Education Week

By Erik W. Robelen

Albuquerque, N.M.

On a recent evening, hundreds of children and their families climbed off school buses and filed into a science center in this city’s historic Old Town neighborhood. The event that drew them, dubbed Family Science Night, was no invitation to hear a lecture on climate change or quantum physics, or to catch a documentary on a gigantic IMAX screen.

Instead, families from two high-poverty public schools dived into an array of hands-on, interactive exhibits separated into small alcoves in a place aptly named Explora , Spanish for “explore.”

And explore they did. Children got their hands wet—literally—as they manipulated objects in water-based displays in the Water of Life, Life of Water exhibit area. They tapped on a keyboard in the Shapes of Sound section that produced not tones but deep vibrations felt through the bench on which they sat. Over in the Moving Air section, they sliced up paper cups to see how different sizes and shapes would float or twirl when placed atop a barrel with a fan inside blowing...