The Outreach Program currently works with many organizations in San Francisco and Oakland, including: AIM High First Graduate San Francisco Unified School District Children's Hospital Oakland UCSF Hospital's Child Life Services Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco YMCA Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE)* *members of SHPE generously volunteer with us from time to time, assisting us with Family Science Nights and translating for Spanish-speaking families

Vivian Altmann, Program Director
Pablo Dela Cruz, Project Manager
Helen Yu-Lei, Senior XTech Facilitator

Since 1984, the Educational Outreach Program has been a link between the Exploratorium and community-based organizations in San Francisco and Oakland that serve inner-city children, teens, and their families.

The Outreach Program offers Exploratorium exhibit-based educational activities via ongoing partnerships with these organizations. Outreach Program staff go out to neighborhood programs on a regular basis, as well as inviting participants to the Exploratorium for special field trips and, in some cases, extended study. We also provide a variety of resources to some of these organizations, including free educational materials, professional in-service workshops for staff, and access to other Exploratorium resources.

Regular Outreach staff are assisted by on-call staff, members of which are either currently working in or recently "graduated" from the Exploratorium's High School Explainer Program. These young, ethnically and culturally diverse team members serve not only as educators, but also as role models for children. They are an integral part of the Outreach Program's success.

Our workshops and activities are always hands-on. Children are trained to manipulate materials, use hand tools, and sometimes even operate simple machinery. They engage in a wide variety of projects, from constructing zoetropes, spectroscopes, and kaleidoscopes to wiring circuits, building mechanical "jitterbugs," or creating armloads of musical instruments to take home with them.

All program services are provided free of charge.

Living within the Educational Outreach Program is an exciting National Science Foundation-funded project called XTech.

Supported by the NSF's Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers program, XTech marks the beginning of an ongoing, student-oriented technology lab here at the Exploratorium. Through intensive summer institutes and mini-institutes during the school year, XTech students build technology-based science projects and learn to use technology tools to communicate, do research, collect data, and document their projects and experiences.

Additional funding for XTech comes from the David B. Gold Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, and Symantec Corporate Giving.