Dr. Judy Brown, the Museum’s Senior Vice President of Education, was recently an invited guest speaker at the Smithsonian Affiliations National Conference, which is held every year in Washington DC. Judy’s presentation, entitled Success with Science: New Approaches for New Audiences, centered on new ways museums might think about promoting science education to their respective communities, with the particular goal of stimulating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills. Currently, the Museum leads the National GirlsRISE Museum project, which is a collaboration of museums nationwide committed to engaging girls in science. Using this model as an example, Dr. Brown shared the important role museums can play in developing the next generation of female scientists and engineers. Dr. Brown’s talk emphasized that these kinds of open collaborations are essential in working towards results that can impact local, regional, and even national audiences. Just another illustration that 2-way streets of communication are always better than 1-way!

The Girls RISE Museum Network (http://girlsrisenet.org/ works to strengthen the professional capacity of informal science educators to engage and motivate minority girls to explore and pursue science and engineering careers. On May 6-7, teams from the California Academy of Sciences, COSI, Explora, Miami Science Museum, NYSCI, OMSI, Saint Louis Science Center, and Sci-Port met at the Miami Science Museum to explore using virtual world technologies in this endeavor.

Virtual worlds provide an immersive environment where users create a digital character, or ‘avatar’, and navigate through a virtual world, while interacting with real people from around the world. This platform is used by many institutions, such as colleges, universities, museums, libraries and government entities. The Miami Science Museum is exploring strategies to use this unique technology to spark excitement about science and lead young people to think of themselves as someone who is informed about science as well as can make a contribution to science.

Teams participated in an event for high school students in which student and RISEnet avatars met in an “in world” space for a presentation on “Solar Variability and its Impact on Climate Change” by Dr. Joanna Haigh, Physics Dept. Chair, Imperial College, London. Participants then interacted in the real world with the students to learn from them about their experiences with virtual worlds.