How to connect with the outdoors indoors?
The fascinating and diverse beauty of nature itself is the most powerful exhibit we can show our visitors. Therefore, it should be our main focus to enable our visitors to connect with nature outside, no matter whether we work in science centres or natural history museums. This connection is essential to raise awareness of conservation and sustainability. But how can we meet this goal while staying inside our buildings?
We will be focussing on the following aspects:
(1) To what extent is it possible to bring the outdoors indoors? What indoor settings are necessary and useful in order to allow our visitors to connect with nature? How can we avoid an overly artificial educational atmosphere?
(2) How can cooperation between different organisations, such as museums, science centres, NGOs, universities, private nature experts etc. allow, intensify and underline this connection between visitors and nature? How can we include different players to contribute to our educational tasks?
Let’s gather and share practical examples of already existing cooperations and ideas for the future!
Session speakers
Head of Education, Natural History Museum Graz
The Theatre of Nature addresses curious visitors of any age. Its goal is to bring the outdoors indoors and hence enable our visitors to connect with nature. The most crucial component is cooperation. Depending on the topic, we invite experts from various institutions and organisations, which work with and for nature (universities, NGOs…). They share experiences with visitors, exchange views on up-to-date topics and offer a hands-on insight into their work.
Wandering LTD was awarded as UNESCO Best Mobile Learning Practice & Mofet Teachers for Teaches Institute in Israel.
On thewandering platform visitors can synchronize the indoor and the outdoor worlds. Knowledge is created around physical locations called “stations” - points of interest. Station based content is where people can meet to create and share experiences. Content is modular and reusable thus creating a new public layer of authentic engagement and creation. On the experiencity.co platform we can create games and scientific moderations based on the stations in a specific location parksor neighborhood
The NATURA Science Center provides innovative access to nature for a responsive audience. Processes in free, inanimate and animate (including men) nature are transmitted live to central indoor bays. Guided interactively, they grow up to comprehensive narratives, ranging from the escorted presentation to the outdoor check of authenticity, with observations non-interfering and unique, visualized unusually and high-tech based, where familiar but never experienced or unknown common turns real.
Project Manager & Pedagogue
Our Science Centre is located well above the Arctic Circle. Spectacular sky phenomena’s like auroras, midnight sun and arctic night, are common, and one of our main focuses is to spread knowledge about this. But we also have plenty of bad weather, auroras are unpredictable, and often the phenomena’s are most interesting at nigh. Our go-to tool for teaching these subjects is our planetarium. We will discuss our experience using this tool for interactive and collaborative school programs and such.
