The Exploratorium communicates a conviction that natural phenomena can be both understood and full of newly discovered magic. The Exploratorium was conceived by physicist Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985). It was Dr. Oppenheimer’s vision to create a collection of interactive exhibits that would make natural phenomena accessible and understandable to everyone. He foresaw exhibits that visitors could play with and learn about phenomena for themselves. After much searching, Dr. Oppenheimer secured a home for his museum in San Francisco, at the Palace of Fine Arts, a vacant remnant of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. When the doors opened in 1969, there were just a few dozen exhibits, most of them borrowed.

Exploratorium, 1969

The museum grew rapidly, though, as more and more new exhibits were built, and the “shop” established itself as the heart of the museum. The shop is almost the first thing a visitor sees on entering the museum, and just outside the shop is an area where new exhibit prototypes are tested and tinkered with.

Though Frank Oppenheimer died in 1985, his spirit lives on in the Exploratorium’s exhibits, which are intriguing, thoughtful, playful, sometimes strange, and sometimes beautiful. Today, there are hundreds of exhibits in this museum of science, art, and human perception, visited by over half a million people each year.

Exploratorium, 1999

From 1991 to 2005, the Exploratorium was directed by French physicist and science educator Goéry Delacôte. During his tenure, Dr. Delacôte worked toward extending the reach of the museum.

As part of creating a “networked” Exploratorium, Dr. Delacôte focused not only on bringing the Exploratorium to the world, but also on bringing the world to the Exploratorium. Workshops bring teachers and professional developers to the Exploratorium, where they learn inquiry-based teaching techniques for both elementary and secondary levels. The Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), a collaboration with King’s College, London, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, uses the museum as a laboratory for examining informal science education and its relationship to K–12 education. The Exploratorium’s Web site offers thousands of pages of unique Web features and teacher resources. Webcasts—live connections with distant sites that are broadcast over the World Wide Web—have focused on bringing “real science” into view, from a total solar eclipse in Africa to the daily eruptions of a volcano in Antarctica.

Through institutes, workshops, and exhibit sales and rentals, the Exploratorium has also exported its exhibitry, expertise, and teaching philosophy to museums throughout the U.S. and around the world. In 1999, the Exploratorium developed the first of many ongoing partnerships with other science museums as part of the Exploratorium Network for Exhibit-based Teaching (ExNET), an international network of museums dedicated to using exhibits to support science education.

In 2006, Dennis Bartels, an internationally known science education and educational policy expert, became the Exploratorium’s next Executive Director. Dr. Bartels has testified before committees of both the United States Senate and House of Representatives, he’s a frequent speaker at science and mathematics education conferences worldwide, and he has the honor of having been elected an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow.

Dr. Bartels assumed the Executive Director position at a time of serious concern about our nation’s competitive edge in the sciences and mathematics. He identified this as “a great moment of opportunity” because of the Exploratorium’s position at the intersection of formal and informal science education. To address this opportunity, the Exploratorium has assumed a leading role in science learning reform and it’s become a center for exploring interactions between science and new media. In addition, we continue to export the Exploratorium’s innovative approaches to exhibit design and teaching to museums around the world.