San Francisco University Museum Exploration Discussion Questions

working on designing STEM activities with virtual museum experience

This activity requires taking a virtual tour of the National Museum of Natural History (link
below). Take your time, explore the museum and learn something from one of the exhibits.
Then create an activity based on your experience that you could do with children virtually or at
the actual museum when it opened.
1. Visit the museum through their virtual tour https://naturalhistory.si.edu/visit/virtual-tour.
You can pick any of the Permanent or Current Exhibits from the main page. It took me awhile to
figure out how to navigate, but you can move around the exhibits and zoom in to read the
signs. Take a little bit of time to figure out the controls and what exhibit hall you want to
explore in depth. Then go through that exhibit and read the informational signs.
2. Answer the following prompts after your museum experience:
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What was the exhibit that you explored in depth?
What was this virtual experience like?
What did you learn?
Imagine you were to take a group of children to this exhibit and needed to plan a STEM
activity to do during or after the experience. Describe the activity. Make sure to include:
o The age range is your activity appropriate for?
o What is the purpose of your activity, what do you want them to learn?
o Describe your activity with enough detail that someone else could do it.