A badge (complete with the typically unflattering picture) can only mean one thing: I'm official!

It was my first week interning at the i.d.e.a. museum (that stands for imagination, design, experience, art), and every volunteer and staff member I met was as warm and welcoming as I could hope for. The museum has few full-time staff, and many of my colleagues are artists, architects, and engineers who have decided to lend their expertise to educating kids. Because the museum consists of a small group of employees and volunteers, they have plenty of back-burner projects for me to work on, and one of those is outreach.

Museum staff currently attend various events in order to get the i.d.e.a. museum name out there, including festivals and teacher conferences. (Coming up on March 28th is one such event that I think might interest some of you--the Southwest Maker Fest, a one-day festival that will feature the work of engineers, artists, cooks, and scientists.) One way the museum tracks the success of its outreach efforts is by passing out coupons at these events and tracking their return when people attend the museum.

This week I talked to i.d.e.a. museum's marketing director, and I'm excited to get my hands on web traffic and survey data from the museum's website next week. While I'll be able to use this data, I'm also looking into creating my own survey or updating the City of Mesa's!

Of course, as I work on my project behind the scenes, I've also found myself working the ground floor of the museum, where the current exhibition is titled Build It.

Clearly this picture was taken inside the museum, with the rainbow and everything.

I'm so impressed by how the museum translates engineering and design concepts to activities kids can enjoy while still learning something. There are stations to teach kids about everything from structural stability to storytelling to city planning. One activity actually invoked paintings produced by a local artist to start a discussion about homogeneity in suburban communities, which is a subject many would assume to be out of the reach of kids in the elementary school age bracket--but the museum has proved that wrong.

Unfortunately, because I would need a whole stack of parent permission slips, I can't share any pictures of kids interacting with the exhibits inside the museum. But next week I'll share pictures of the exhibits alone from before the museum opens, so you can see just what I mean. I'll soon have a hand in designing some of these activities, starting with one on adobe brick! I hope to design an activity that can communicate the scientific concepts involved in this ancient building technique, as well as its history.

Meanwhile, publication work rolls on at Young Authors of Arizona, and I'm happy to announce the three cover options that we're having young writers vote on:




Each of these works earned a Gold or Silver Key in the Scholastic Art Awards, and I'm excited to see which ends up wrapping together the best writing we received this year!

I've recently begun my work as a mentor-editor in the poetry category, trying to balance between helping pieces reach their full potential and preserving their artistic integrity. Since I only know one of the writers I'm mentoring, it's been really interesting getting to know these students through their writing alone. That said, we're conducting the process through Google Docs this year, and the digitized nature of that connection can make the work feel a little impersonal. This has me returning to that idea of having a platform for writers to interact on our website, because I do think that the "social media" aspect can actually make editing a more personal process, as paradoxical as that may seem.

I can't wait to continue my work next week with both the i.d.e.a. museum and Young Authors of Arizona! I love getting to know new people, and that's probably the biggest difference I've noticed in my life since Senior Research Projects began--I've been meeting so many people with completely different lifestyles, outlooks, and goals from mine. It's a very rewarding and humbling experience, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to enter the "real world" this way through the SRP!