Last Wednesday I met with David Perry, Science Education Manager at OMSI. He gave me a tour of the Science Education Resource Center at OMSI. I initially contacted him because I was curious about science education resources at OMSI besides the museum itself, as it is obviously a huge resource. The center itself is about the size of a typical conference room and holds traditional resources you might assume science teachers could find useful, textbooks and curriculum written by OMSI that has accumulated over the years. The room also doubles as a video conferencing space where David holds remote science classes for schools and libraries. Their center is used by educators in home school and traditional public and private schools as well. One issue he says is that OMSI isn’t really the first thing that would come to mind if a teacher were looking for a resource so they have relatively low traffic and are only open one afternoon a week. He said they do hold some professional development workshops but it is quite limited at the moment and he would very much like to see that type of programming expanded. The room is open to teachers as a resource one afternoon a week and the rest of the time it is used as a meeting space. It was really throught provoking to speak with him because as the meeting went on and he described what the space does and what it could do its very clear that there is a desire to greatly expand programmatically and space wise. Here are a few photos for reference of the SERC. On a final note the center has an agreement with NASA to house NASA specific educational resources there which takes up quite a bit of space because they regularly send them things and they are obligated to hold on to those things such as a video tape copier so educators are able to copy videos. This is also why you see so much space related things in the pictures below.
There are a lot of concepts in this room that could balloon into something larger and more accessible including but not limited to:
video conferencing
curriculum development
library/resources
kits for checkout
hands on educational lessons for K-12 students
professional development programs
etc. etc.
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