Community Science Workshop / Austin Children's Museum

The Community Science Workshop is a new project sponsored by the Austin Children's Museum.

The Workshop is a community-based discovery center, and is part of the larger mission of the downtown Austin Children's Museum. The Community Science Workshop specifically seeks to attract and engage children, parents, and caregivers who might not ordinarily think of going to a museum. Austin Children's Museum Executive Director Mike Nellis states this very powerfully, "We want to make sure that children who don't usually go to museums can still have a museum experience."

The Workshop is dedicated to hands-on learning and is envisioned as an environment that sparks curiosity, unleashes creativity, and encourages social interaction among children ages 7-11. Decisions about what gets done, studied, or created are made, for the most part, by the children themselves. Participants are offered exhibits and sample projects, and a wealth of materials to "mess around with" and "make stuff."

Guided by adult staff members, children decide on a project to create and pursue it. Children can take as much time as they want, and projects that carry over from one visit to the next are encouraged. Adults facilitate the use of the tools and the understanding of science concepts behind the projects.

The Community Science Workshop is a national program funded by the National Science Foundation, in partnership with the local sponsors. Each Workshop is community center filled with science, technology and art, and is devoted to providing local youth with opportunities to pursue their own firsthand learning. Its mission is to attract children and youth from local neighborhoods that drop in after school and on weekends. Directors and staff are science aficionados, community activists, and youth advocates.

Most importantly, the Community Science Workshop sets out to be a unique community partnership between existing agencies, programs, museums, school districts, universities and community centers - all in the service of bringing high quality learning experiences to the children and youth in the community. Two unique and mutually reinforcing goals of this studio are to 1) make a cool place that kids want to come and 2) engage the local community to find ways of "bringing people in."

Community Partners

This studio will design a new Community Science Workshop in East Austin. Key members of the Austin Children's Museum staff have agreed to serve as advisers and collaborators on the project. ACM has provided funding for this studio, which will subsidize a studio visit to the Houston and Miami Community Science Workshops as part of the research and design process.

Community Exhibit

Student designs will be presented for review and comment to a wide range of visitors throughout the semester. It is an explicit intention of this studio to make our design and research process accessible to the general public, as a way to further the mission of the ACM and to engage our School of Architecture in a vital community project. Architects, engineers, kids and parents should all be considered integral to this project. At the end of the semester, student projects will be presented to the wider community and exhibited at the Austin Children's Museum.