Visit from CAMP

We had a really lovely visit today by Ryoko Matsumoto of CAMP, together with a few friends and co-workers. They seemed truly excited about our activities and philosophy, and it was a pleasure to have them.

Chain Reaction machines

Last week we hosted a small workshop with the Field Trip Explainers, as part of their daily training. Half of the explainers participated one day, and the other half the next: someone has to help those poor kids out on the floor to explore!

An extra motivation for the workshop was preparing for the upcoming Pi Day at the Exploratorium, when we will try to replicate a version of this activity of the floor, for the general public (Yikes!). So we provided each time with a Pi(e)-themed object to somehow incorporate in the contraption. See if you can spot them…

Oh, coincidentally March 14 (3-14, get it? Pi? Nevermind…) is also Einstein’s birthday, so there were a few Einstein-themed knickknacks too.

The workshop was great, and the range of solutions these guys came up with in a scant one and a half hours was astounding. For a more complete set of pictures, click here.

Light Play with Pulley Table

We worked with Jessica Strick on combining Light Play with the Make your own pulley exhibit, to see if anything exciting would come out of it. Here are some photos from the three-day session.

Pulley table before we started working on it.

Walter’s oscillating light source.

Spinning mirrors, another Walter creation.

3D shadows.

Karen’s multicolored display. The discovery of dichroic glass was fundamental.

Luigi drilled 267 holes through two disks to get an organic-looking light-shadow interaction.

Walter made an awesome reflector-projector.

Jessica’s display achieved complicated-looking movement without moving any object, just the light sources.

The Learning Studio is never done!

But if it were, it would probably be now. Let us triumphantly announce the new and improved learning studio. Now with more tinkering! Click on the red cabinet to see for yourself: