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| The Explainer Program satisfied a goal that I had been unable to achieve satisfactorily in a classroom. It enabled us to have a workable program in which the process of teaching facilitates learning. Everybody admits that they learn more when they start teaching than they did in courses. These high school students are learning constantly in formal and informal sessions and at the same time, often the same afternoon, they have an opportunity to teach others what they have learned. |  | ||
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| corresponds identically to a chapter of a standard physics text; one room on mechanics, one on optics, one on light, etc. I realized more than ever that a great virtue of a museum lies in its ability to unify things rather than to separate them. In a course that meets every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, one is forced to present the material in a linear fashion. The over-compartmentalization of the physics in the Munich Museum made me much more aware of the great potential for presenting a unifying overview that constitutes a special characteristic of museums. In the American Museum of Natural History exhibits on culture, I realized another very special property of museums. They have multiple examples of cultures from different islands and different continents; yet each culture is shown with a richness of detail; each has its pots, its weaving, its tools and its housing. Each one is different, yet through the multiple examples, one begins to abstract and to discover the common elements, the true meaning of a culture. In the Exploratorium we have therefore tried to do just that. We do not, for example, have just one exhibit on refraction, one on interference and one on the polarized light. An entire small section is developed for each kind of behavior, displaying six or eight examples of each topic in a variety of contexts. There are many things that we have not been able to do as well as others have done. Both | |||
| I spent a week at the Munich Museum. I was impressed by their program in which teachers came to the museum in the fall before school opened for a protracted session and had a complete training on the use and the contents of the museum. We have been able to adapt that idea in our museum through our School-in-the-Exploratorium (SITE) program, which develops teacher training workshops. I learned many things in the Munich Museum. Everything was so well-crafted there that I think they must have been made by elves in the basement. Yet I noticed that one man had come up out of the subterranean shop and was using one of the exhibits, a fancy milling machine, to do something he couldn't do in the basement. It was so nice to watch him that I think that incident first suggested to me our policy of having the Exploratorium machine and carpentry shops open to public view. But I also learned some negative things there. The Munich Museum presents physics in a series of rooms, and the material in each room | |||