Over the past few months I have been taking students into the Exploratorium in a very controlled way for specific reasons to do specific things. Yesterday I finally had an opportunity to just open the doors and let them loose. It was the most engaged I’ve ever seen them. There was laughter, lots of noise with banging tuning forks, drums with sand on them, air pumps going, bubbles being blown, the ripple tank rattling and pucks bouncing around on the air table. Myself and another teacher bounced around the room answering questions about each one, showing kids how to use the equipment, repairing things from over zealous use . The shear number of light bulb moments and ‘oh wow!’ moments made my day. I was thrilled and exhausted by the end. And we finished off with Bruno Mars on the Rubens tube . I can’t do it every lesson as they will get bored very quickly so I’ll need to swap out some stuff for next time and out some new items in there, but it worked! It has also opened up a bunch of follow up lesson ideas for PBL like we did during the UTS course. Now I can start working them through the plethora of ‘Sir why did this do that’