IN THIS ISSUE
November/December 2008

In 2009, science centers and museums will celebrate the Year of Science, Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, and the International Year of Astronomy. Every year, many institutions plan programs around global initiatives like Earth Science Week and international holidays like World Environment Day. New celebrations such as NanoDays and the Cambridge Science Festival, Massachusetts, are introducing thousands of people to science. In this issue, we examine how science celebrations are advancing public engagement with science, changing attitudes, bringing in new audiences, and strengthening links among science centers.

Contents
• Year of Science 2009: Communicating, Collaborating, and Celebrating Science, by Sheri Potter and Judy Scotchmoor
• From the Origin to the Future of Species: Celebrating Darwin’s Legacy, by Katie Edwards
• Stars Align for the International Year of Astronomy 2009, by Kat Stein
• ASTC and the International Year of Astronomy 2009, by Walter Staveloz
• Challenging and Changing Minds: Emotional Learning and Physics Competitions, by Rachel Moll
• We Threw a Party and Everybody Came: A Science Celebration Sampler (Small Things Considered, by Vrylena Olney and Karen Pollard; Doors Wide Open for Earth Science Week, by Geoff Camphire and Adrienne Barnett; Cooking Up Science in Cambridge, by John Durant and P.A. d’Arbeloff; Celebrating Science, Enlightening Community in Gujarat, by Narottam Sahoo)

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By John Durant and P.A. d’Arbeloff
From ASTC Dimensions
November/December 2008

Recipe:
1. Take one science city.
2. Carefully extract the juiciest parts, making sure to retain all the most enthusiastic graduate students, and as many superstar researchers and Nobel Laureates as you can find.
3. Mix thoroughly with generous quantities of actors, artists, broadcasters, critics, curators, entrepreneurs, exhibitors, impresarios, inventors, musicians, raconteurs, and writers.
4. Add a cup of civic leadership and a teaspoon of organizational flair, and bake for several months.
5. Serve as more than 200 separate courses over nine days, making sure that all sections of the community get plenty to eat.

This, in essence, is the Cambridge Science Festival (www.cambridgesciencefestival.org). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum, Cambridge, launched our first Cambridge Science Festival in April 2007, in the belief that what festivals have long done for art, literature, and music they can—and should—do for science and technology. Our aim was to throw open the laboratory doors in our particular science city, so that the whole community could celebrate what makes Cambridge—a small, not particularly prosperous city in Massachusetts—a truly world-class place.

A science stew
We have been excited by the positive response to the Cambridge Science Festival from the wider community. During our first festival, about 15,000 people attended 150 different events. In the second year, we almost doubled our attendance, as an estimated 28,000 people came to more than 200 events in 45 venues. Each year, the festival benefits from experience and momentum. Presenters become better at offering science to a broader audience in creative ways, and neighbors buzz about what surprises next year’s event might hold.

Highlights this year, from our point of view, included Lunch with a Laureate, a series of five lunchtime conversations between a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and the public; Powers of Ten, an oratorio about scale in the universe performed by the North Cambridge Family Opera; QED, a play about physicist Richard Feynman (MIT Class of 1939), produced by the Catalyst Collaborative (a partnership between MIT and a local theater company); and the Curiosity Awards, which honored more than 100 students for essays and artwork expressing their curiosity.

Brewing up benefits
Why would the MIT Museum—a relatively small museum of science and technology—take the lead in organizing a big initiative like this? First, the Cambridge Science Festival is an ideal flagship for MIT’s community outreach. Second, the MIT Museum is perfectly positioned to do something like this, with one foot firmly planted in the professional world of science and technology and the other foot equally firmly planted in the wider community. Third, organizing a festival is a great way to establish a wide network of partners across the community. Through the festival, our museum now works actively with several others (including the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, and the Museum of Science, Boston), as well as with dozens of civic, commercial, cultural, and educational organizations.

Our festival brings us many other benefits. For example, museum attendance more than doubles during the week of the festival. With the surge in visitation comes an increase in the number of “science inattentive” visitors, or folks who are not naturally drawn to science and not likely to visit science museums. Admittedly, the audience for our Lunch with a Laureate tended to have an established interest in science. But this was not so for the Science of Wine, or its sequel, Brewing Innovation. Sure, our full houses on those nights were enticed by the wine and beer tasting that followed the lectures, but attendees also soaked up the scientific research being done with yeast. Many of them were first-time visitors who enjoyed this slightly unusual introduction to the museum. A survey given to every visitor showed that they overwhelmingly felt that they had both benefited from the programs and enjoyed themselves.

We’re committed to cooking up the Cambridge Science Festival annually. (The 2009 festival is set for April 25 to May 3.) And we’re happy that other cities across the United States appear to be developing a taste for the same sort of thing. We’re actively collaborating with colleagues on the San Diego Science Festival, planned for March 2009. We’re also looking to the possibility of creating a web portal and resources to help other cities start their own science festivals. We believe ASTC-member institutions can play an important role in creating a strong network of U.S. science festivals. After all, aren’t we in the business of creatively communicating science to new audiences? If you can turn that communication into a celebration, invite a crowd, and have some fun, it’s icing on the cake.

John Durant is executive director of the MIT Museum. P.A. d’Arbeloff is director of the Cambridge Science Festival.

More than 1,800 science center professionals from 31 countries gathered in Philadelphia, October 18–21, for the 2008 ASTC Annual Conference. Over 140 conference sessions challenged participants to explore their responsibility to both their scientific and public constituencies. Keynote speaker Steven Berlin Johnson, a journalist, cultural critic, and web developer, encouraged science centers to become places where new ideas can develop. Joe Palca, science correspondent for National Public Radio, moderated a plenary session, “The Global Discussion on Global Sustainability: Where Do Science Centers Fit In?” with panelists Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change; Lynne Cherry, author of numerous science books for young readers; and Philip C. Myrick, vice president of the New York–based Project for Public Spaces.

Dennis Wint, president and CEO of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, received the ASTC Fellow Award for Outstanding Contribution, ASTC’s highest honor. Six Roy L. Shafer Leading Edge Awards were presented at the conference: the Award for Business Practice to the Saint Louis Science Center, Missouri; the Award for Visitor Experience, Small Science Center, to the National Canal Museum, Easton, Pennsylvania; two Awards for Visitor Experience, Large Science Center, to the Ontario Science Centre, Toronto, and the Virginia Living Museum, Newport News; the Award for New Leadership in the Field to Cynthia Graville-Smith of the Saint Louis Science Center; and the Award for Experienced Leadership in the Field to Ingit Mukhopadhyay of the National Council of Science Museums, India.

Audio recordings of most sessions can be purchased on CD from Convention Recordings International.

About the image: Conference attendees gather in the ASTC Resource Center between sessions. Photo by Christine Ruffo

Last year, ASTC members served millions of students through school outreach programs. That work continued this morning at the ASTC Annual Conference with an off-site session, Outreach Live. Presenters from around the region brought their science centers’ best outreach programs to the Friends Select School in Philadelphia for both students and museum colleagues. A roundtable discussion followed to review and evaluate the programs.

Jonah Cohen, one of the session organizers, described the mutual benefits of the program, which has been part of the conference line-up for over a decade: “Participants get the chance to see the full program that other centers do, in front of school children, the program’s intended audience. For the presenters, it’s a singular opportunity to get feedback from a huge variety of their peers. Furthermore, the programming is provided free to a local school, usually chosen because it’s in a underserved district, so the kids and teachers benefit, too.”

This year’s programming included two assemblies (The Human Body by the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, and Weather: Wind, Water, & Temperature by the Museum of Science, Boston) and two hands-on classes (Slime Time by the Maryland Science Center, Baltimore, and Moveable Museum in a mobile paleontology lab from the American Museum of Natural History, New York City).  

About the image: With help from Maryland Science Center outreach educators, second graders at the Friends Select School learn about polymers by experimenting with slime. Photo by Christine Ruffo

As advances in neuroscience reveal biological pathways underlying emotion, attention, and memory, how can science centers harness this new research to create effective museum experiences? In an October 19 session at the ASTC Annual Conference, Jayatri Das, senior exhibit and program developer at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, led a panel of experts in neuroscience, education, and museums in a discussion of practical ways that museums can integrate new insights about the brain with educational pedagogy to enhance free-choice learning.

Presenters in the session, entitled “Museums and the Mind: Applying Cognitive Neuroscience to Free-Choice Learning,” included Roger Barrett, exhibit designer at the Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul; John Falk, professor of science education at Oregon State University in Corvallis; Matthew Wenger, graduate associate at Flandrau: The University of Arizona Science Center in Tucson; and Jennifer Mangels, associate professor of psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York.

The presenters considered how museums can use recent neuroscience research to maximize their educational impact. Barrett discussed examples of ways that exhibition design, including choice of color and materials, can affect visitors’ moods and emotions. Falk presented research showing that when visitors to the exhibition Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear experienced an optimal amount of emotional arousal—not too much or too little—their learning was maximized. Wenger suggested creating flexible exhibitions that can be adapted to serve the needs of different people. Drawing upon neuroscience research, Mangels stated people learn best when they experience an unexpected outcome that provides a great deal of novelty and complexity, but can be viewed as a challenge rather than as a threat. ”Meeting challenges is actually rewarding in and of itself,” she said. “Things should not be too hard or too easy.”