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Projects 

Rachel Codex
A project with a growing partner list including: Chapter 510, NaNoWriMo, Arizona State U's Center for Science and the Imagination, the LongNow Foundation, Afrosurreal Writers, and more.

ALIEN LITERATURE

 

Any exoplanet worth its (ba)salt has a Canon of Literature.

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Interestingly enough, mysterious literary excerpts from an exoplanet have suddenly appeared in a small storage area beneath our largest telescope, Rachel... via a wormhole, of course. Our literary research team has thus far uncovered many documents: a Farmer's Almanac, engineering manual, retro-exo cookbook, a book of poetry, and more. The team calls this collection The Rachel Codex, and have described the documents as "little windows," "fractal-like," and "disarmingly familiar"...

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Through a series of panel discussions, workshops, and writing projects with local at-risk teens, we used these excerpts as jumping-off points for discussion. In an increasingly global science environment, it is essential that we have thoughtful, inclusive dialogue about sometimes-challenging issues. When we examine how we think, in this case through science fiction, it gives us room for pause and allows space for such dialogue to happen.  

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To find out more...https://rachelcodex.squarespace.com/

 

Creative Collaboration Curriculum
 

SCIENCE's CREATIVE SIDE

 

Will you build a spaceship, or an alien sewing machine? Will you be able to agree on what it will look like, how it could be built? This depends on the collective imagination, ingenuity, and collaborative efforts of you and ALL your classmates... 

 

Through a generous grant from the Association of Science-Technology Center's Creativity Garden, and in partnership with visiting artists and engineers, we piloted a new Creative Collaboration Curriculum in our Champions of Science middle school program for at-risk OUSD youth in 2016, culminating with the design and fabrication of a collaborative STEAM project - an awesome Rube Goldberg Machine. In this pilot program, we incorporated team building and storied thinking (metaphor, multiple endpoints, etc) into the scientific inquiry process, and encouraged students to explore the history of our stories about science, to think about WHY we think the way we do, to examine our assumptions, and to become a team that thinks and and builds together toward creative science futures.

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We studied how art and science have influenced, and can support, each other, and piloted Chabot's first...
         Artist in Residence Program  
 
Artist Jacki Rust worked with our visitors over several weeks to bring Einstein to life, tile by tile. Each visitor was given a color palette to paint on their individual tile, and once the tiles had all been hung, there he was!...
Artist in Residence Program #2
 
Artist Cere Davis invited visitors to interact with her Water Organ, so they could explore complex system dynamics through hands-on play, and see how electromagnetic forces affected the beautiful free-floating magnets. Bonus: it was mesmerizing to watch, and created a strange, ethereal sound!...

Coming in 2024...

I Remember Venn...

HISTORY REDUX

 

Tell all by only telling some! 

 

What better way to summarize the vast history of science than shortening it to a few soundbytes? Venn Diagrams are succinct, intriguing, and fun, and they reveal more than you might think...

 

The stories of our scientific past are riddled with ideas and memes that express how we see the world. We'll explore how pulling out, and highlighting, some of these can help us find patterns and vocabulary that shed light on how we have talked about (and shaped) science.

 

As any hula-hoop great knows, you can do wondrous things with a few circles.

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