On Friday, January 10, Mr. Fung, and Ms. Faitel accompanied their students in AP Psychology, Intro to Engineering and Design, and Principles of Engineering to explore San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which sits on the Piers 15 and 17 in Embarcadero. The trip was designed to help students engage with their material beyond the textbooks. Psychology students mainly focused on the mental health and neuroscience sections of the building, while IED students stayed mostly in the engineering section.
The full-day field trip began alongside school timings, with students taking the BART at around 8:30 in the morning. Groups reached the exploratorium around 10, with the opportunity to pick your own company. The psychology class had an emphasis on certain exhibits, such as visual illusions and physical feelings, exploring the realm of perception and human understanding. Classes would then eat lunch in the food court of the exploratorium, with enough time to visit at least the required five exhibitions. The party left around 2 PM, early enough to catch the girls’ basketball game for players who had accompanied them to the field trip.
The visit wasn’t just about observation, though. Nakul Vijay (12) says it “wasn’t just a museum, but an interactive experience”, and Mr. Thomas mentions that “instead of prohibiting touch, you were encouraged to put your hands on
everything”. The exploratorium is split into multiple exhibits ranging from the complexities of fluid dynamics to the intricacies behind stop motion photography, so each class had ample resources to discover the applications for the theories they learned at school and what their subjects were really about. In previous years, exhibits have included frog dissections, architecture labs, and color theory. Vijay noted his favorite one was display calculating and following the tides of the Bay.
Overall, the field trip to the exploratorium offered students a hands-on opportunity to connect classroom concepts with real-world applications, sparking curiosity and deepening their understanding of psychology, engineering, and beyond.
