Going on the Field Trip of a Lifetime at The Exploratorium

Think about your favorite field trips you took as a child and how the very best ones, those thrilling excursions that created such cherished memories, had seamlessly combined both education and fun. The Exploratorium has long been a benchmark field trip destination for kids and educators of the San Francisco region and beyond. It’s not hard to imagine why when the museum is home to over 700 hands-on, interactive exhibits like sun painting, the fog bridge and the ever popular tornado simulator.

On average, The Exploratorium welcomes 600,000 visitors annually, with roughly 100,000 of those walking through their doors on field trips. Heather Snider, the Director of Individual Giving at The Exploratorium, says that one of the core values of the organization is to instill both informal and lifelong learning. Informal learning, she explains, is education that happens outside of the classroom. “All of our programs speak to that…. it’s about exploration, it’s about being a kid.”

Established in 1969 and founded by physicist Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, the museum features both “vintage” and “contemporary” exhibits and activities, “and they coexist in a really amazing way,” Snider says. Oppenheimer’s vision that anyone, no matter what their age or background, can access the world of physics is still the driving force of the museum’s work today. “All you need to do is put a pendulum in a room and let kids play with it and they will figure out how velocity and acceleration are interrelated.”

To ensure that every child was learning and interacting on an even playing field, The Exploratorium pioneered EDGE: Exhibit Design for Girls’ Engagement. A years-long project, EDGE researched how girls and women interacted and engaged differently than boys and men.

“When you have men developing exhibits and teaching science, they’re doing it in a way that’s more accessible to the way boys think about things,” she says, adding, “We realized we could design exhibits in a way that better represents everyone.”

For instance, Snider explains that researchers discovered that when girls approach an exhibit, they tend to watch someone else do it first so they can learn how to interact, while boys would run right up and get hands on. In turn, the museum rebuilt exhibits in a way that two or three visitors could be engaging at a time, rather than just one at a time.

“Sure enough, over time, the girls would gravitate towards those exhibits. An exhibit that girls had been skipping for decades all of a sudden became very popular.” Snider says that the organization has great pride in what EDGE accomplished and that “this groundbreaking work has been adopted by science museums around the world.”

The Exploratorium’s appeal to kids of all ages (Snider notes that “on any given day in the museum, you’ll see people from age 3 to 93”) is possible largely in part to the efforts of donors who give towards the organization’s efforts and overall mission. “Our donors are motivated by the impact of what they see on field trips or from our free access programs,” Snider says, adding, “they provide us with general support and allow us to put funds where they are most needed.”

Snider says that the trust-based philanthropy that comes by way of unrestricted, long-term giving through donor-advised funds are “exceedingly valuable and important to us, especially as we live in uncertain times.”

Whether a donor is giving based on the nostalgia of their own childhood, or they want to grant the next generation with the gift of education, Snider says of the nonprofit: “We elevate learning….we fundamentally believe that our society will be a better place if people have knowledge and are interested in facts.”

Photos courtesy of The Exploratorium.