The process of researching colleges, understanding your choices, completing applications, and choosing the best school for you, can be really overwhelming. On Sunday, February 24th, 40 students from the Museum’s Upward Bound Math & Science Program, ranging from 9th to 12th grade, had to chance to take some of those first steps with their friends, Upward Bound staff mentors, and even the Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Alberto Carvalho. They attended the National College Fair at the DoubleTree Hilton Convention Center, sponsored by the National Association of College Admission Counseling and the School Board of Miami-Dade County.

The first person to greet them at the entrance was Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools Alberto Carvalho and School Board Chair Perla Tabares-Hantman. The students introduced themselves, and Superintendent Carvalho asked them which high schools they represented and congratulated them on their accomplishments in the Upward Bound Program. Then the students had a lot of ground to cover at the Fair. Over 200 colleges from all over the country were present, and students were able to talk to lots of college/university representatives and receive all the admissions information they needed. Students also attended workshops on scholarships and financial aid, college admissions, college prep, SAT/ACT Exam information, and more.

Now there are some informed choices to be made!

From left to right: Oscar, Alex, School Board Chair Perla Tabares-Hantman, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, Jose, Raymond, Omar, Elizabeth, Claudia

Teachers of the gifted spend two days at the Museum making salt dance, building and testing mousetrap cars, launching rockets, and more. Thanks to the GPEX Science Collaborative Curriculum Challenge Grant, funded by the Florida Department of Education, 25 teachers from gifted student programs at eight Title-I MDCPS K-5 and K-8 schools recently participated in two days of professional development at the Museum.

The GPEX Science project goals focus on improving gifted students’ academic achievement in science, increasing the number of hands-on inquiry science lessons provided to gifted students, and providing professional development to all project staff. Participants learned to use the Museum’s After-school Program Exploring Science (APEX) curriculum to address science standards, and practiced inquiry-based teaching strategies. They are now using APEX Science in their classrooms throughout the school year, and are working collaboratively to develop extensions of the APEX Science curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students.

This is the third year that the Museum has collaborated with Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ Advanced Academics Program to provide hands-on science training, curriculum and materials for teachers of the gifted. To date, almost 4,000 K-5 gifted children have been served, and 3 published collections of APEX curriculum extensions for gifted children (developed by master teachers trained at Museum) have been distributed to all K-5 gifted teachers.

This week, Gillian Thomas, President and CEO of the Miami Science Museum, took the Miami Herald on a tour of the construction site of our upcoming Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. The excitement is building, as the Museum is starting to literally come up out of the ground!

Click here for the grand tour!

If you read the recent post on this blog and were hoping for a real time-lapse video of the construction so far on our new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, your wish has been granted. The following video was released today, and condenses months of work into just 14 seconds. Watch closely!

If you’ve ever seen one of those time-lapse videos – bustling crowds at Grand Central Station, swirling clouds steadily forming into a hurricane, or construction workers erecting a building bit by bit – it really makes you appreciate the action in a whole new way. In the case of those clouds, if you see just one image, it may look calm and serene. But if you see a sequence of images showing a hurricane forming, it can feel like an intense, dynamic spectacle. It’s kind of like a zoetrope, which is a device that has been around for thousands of years, that gives the illusion of motion through a series of images in rapid succession. In the image below, the little girl is watching the zoetrope at the Miami Science Museum.

When the little girl leans down to look through the slits in the side of the rotating cylinder, the images of the still-frame horses appear to be one galloping horse.

Documenting the construction of the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science is like that zoetrope. On any given day, a photo can be taken of lots of workers doing their jobs bit by bit. But looking at a few photos in sequence, you can begin to see the changes in action. Just imagine how the building and these workers would look in a time-lapse video. Or even through a zoetrope. Stay tuned for more action!

June 20, 2012 (For reference, notice the new Perez Art Museum Miami under construction in the background, and the Adrienne Arsht Center to the left)

September 10, 2012 (from the same viewpoint)

November 28, 2012 (from the same viewpoint; the Arsht Center is just off the image to the left)

It’s important for children – the next generation – to understand that food doesn’t magically appear on grocery store shelves. Growing food takes knowledge and skill, and in an urban environment like Miami, it’s important for our health, as well as the health of the environment, to have locally grown food. Hydroponics, the growing of plants using mineral nutrients and water – without soil – is a sustainable method of food production that provides more opportunties for urban gardening. The Museum has recently built on-site hydroponics exhibits, and now, with grants from the Dunwalke Foundation and the Envionmental Protection Agency, is working to install small hydroponic gardens at local schools.  The Museum’s Sara Tomeo, who is leading the project, is working mostly with 4th and 5th grade students from several area elementary schools, including Barbara Hawkins, North Miami, Miami Springs, Mater Academy East, Southside, and Coconut Grove,  as well as Nature Links, an organization on Virginia Key that specializes in helping young adults with disabilities.

Teachers at partner schools are encouraged to have groups of students help plant the system, and so far, eager students have done much of the work in setting up many of the systems. The goal is to have students learn to grow their own food throughout the school year, learn where some of the food they eat comes from, and see how different plants grow. Additionally, each school will learn how urban gardening can be applied based on the location of each school.  For example, many students in Southside Elementary, located in Brickell, live in high-rise buildings, and this project will teach them that they can have a garden at home - even if they don’t have a yard!

Barbara Hawkins Elementary: Students’ indoor hydroponics system, called “Emily’s Garden System,” sits on a classroom table with an adjustable grow-light to promote growth.

Barbara Hawkins Elementary: Students planted basil, rosemary, lemon balm, a tomato plant, and lettuce. Science teacher Craig Uptgrow has students monitoring growth rate, taking height measurements, and keeping records of what they do with the system.

Sara Tomeo has a background in Environmental Design and has worked as an intern at Disney’s “The Land” pavilion at EPCOT, working in hydroponic greenhouses. Sara has now helped to design and build the hydroponic exhibits at the Museum, and will play a role in the Museum’s plans to build aquaponics systems, which is another kind of sustainable food production system involving aquatic life.

It can be difficult for some schools to provide opportunities to get their students to the Museum. And it’s a goal of the Museum to involve our entire community (and beyond) in the amazing adventure of science. So through our Science Stars program, we are making an effort to go out into the community to reach those students who are not able to visit us. Between now and the opening of our new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, we will work with Miami-Dade County Public Schools to select nine schools per year and connect that school with a “Science Star” who will give a special presentation about their field of science and what inspired them to pursue that career. Each school, along with children’s families, will then be invited to a free event at the Museum where they will receive a free 1-year family membership to the Museum – so they can come back again!

In December the program continued with a visit to Comstock Elementary School with Science Star Lindsay Bartholomew. With a background in physics and astronomy, and currently the Science Curator for the Miami Science Museum, Lindsay shared stories about what inspired her to pursue a career in science (those first glimpses at the Moon through a telescope, hearing from her Grandpa at 5 years old that the Sun was 93 MILLION miles away), and shared other stories about some unique experiences that continue to inspire her (like going on an expedition to Antarctica to learn about climate change). During the presentation, students were taken on a trek into Antarctica (did you know that baby penguins go to “penguin kindergarten” when they’re old enough for their parents to go get dinner, but not quite old enough to be left alone?), and then on a journey through the solar system (did you know that Saturn would float if you could find a bathtub big enough?). Then Lindsay led the students in a Jeopardy-like trivia game, and made a scientific discovery – Comstock Elementary has lots of potential future scientists!

Do you know the question for this trivia answer in the “Planet Puzzle” category? The students did!

Channel 10 reporter Christina Vazquez speaks with Museum President Gillian Thomas at the construction site for the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science

Museum President and CEO Gillian Thomas, Vice President of Marketing Tony Lima, and the workers at the construction site for the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science had a very special visitor this week. Channel 10 WPLG reporter Christina  Vazquez joined them on “the plaza level” of the new Museum building – which was a first for everyone!

The visit resulted in a piece aired on Wednesday evening’s newscast, as well as a Channel 10 webpage to support our story. Click here to watch the broadcast, read the story, and see lots of amazing photos!

For humans, if your home has a recognizable scent, that may or may not be a good thing. But for bees, it is a necessary part of life, and of finding its way home. Bees find their way to their own hive because of a distinct scent that they can recognize. If you want to see a real beehive up close, and safely, you can even come to the Museum and see our beehive exhibit, made possible by the Junior League of Miami.

Because bees are are so beguiling in many ways, they are the subject of one of the Museum’s Early Childhood Hands-On Science (ECHOS) curriculum units. After receiving training on the materials from Museum education staff, pre-school teachers throughout Miami-Dade County and Head Start schools, lead the children in exploring their world, as well as the bees’ world. The children learned first-hand that bees know which hive is their own only by the scent, by becoming bees themselves. Each was given a cup with a scent, and they had to explore their classroom to find the hive that matched their scent. But they did not want to stop exploring even after they found their hive. One wanted to draw his own beehive based on the ECHOS Busy, Buzzing Bees book, one wanted to see how the beehive model in the classroom compared to photos of real hives, and a couple wanted to match up the scents of all the “hives” in the room. These children in the photos below are true explorers.

A lone mangrove seedling

On Saturday, December 8^th, 60 Upward Bound Eco-Ambassadors joined a group of volunteers from Miami-Dade College in replanting almost 1,000 mangrove propagules at R. Hardy Matheson Preserve. The Preserve is undergoing a major management effort by Miami-Dade County to remove exotic plants, replant native habitats such as mangroves, and create a multi-use protected area for recreational activities.

In all, over 100 volunteers participated in planting mangrove seedlings that had been exhibited on a wall at Miami Science Museum since November 2011, as part of the Museum’s Reclamation Project.  Specifically, they planted young mangrove plants along the banks of the Snapper Creek, a historical waterway. Not only does Snapper Creek have historical significance, as evidenced by a 500 B.C. Tequesta Indian habitation mound, but it is also one of the largest tracts of coastal native habitat in Miami-Dade County. Until recently, the banks of the creek where the volunteers planted were covered in large mounds of landfill which were dumped there as part of periodic dredging of the creek for the purpose of recreational navigation. These mounds were also, until recently, covered in invasive plants such as Australian pine and Brazilian pepper, and devoid of any native vegetation. Thanks to the efforts of these Eco-Ambassadors, this area will once again be covered in mangroves and associated plants which will provide food and shelter for native birds, mammals and reptiles, such as the endangered American crocodile and the West Indian manatee.

This effort is being funded by a State Farm Youth Advisory Board grant to engage local teenagers in restoring local habitat, outdoor learning and telling their own stories about South Florida’s natural areas through film. Click here for more information on the Reclamation Project, the Eco-Ambassadors, and the State Farm Youth Advisory Board.

The eco-ambassadors gather to start the day

The group wades into the water to replant mangroves