Happy New Year! Welcome to our newest edition of Science Hub.
I could not be happier to bid farewell to 2020 and welcome 2021 with continued perseverance, determination, and optimism. COSI, like many, has been impacted by COVID-19. We closed in March and have twice planned to re-open. But with numbers skyrocketing, we determined it was best to continue our COVID-induced closure.
We like to say, COSI’s physical doors may be closed, but our community doors are wide open.
This is an unprecedented time and there have been hard times, but there have also been an abundance of innovative and new opportunities that we have focused on over the last nine months. For example, we took the COSI Science Festival digital in 2020, and will again in 2021, as we redefine how to engage partners and create impact in a virtual world. We have also bolstered our digital resources online and in the COSI app, providing free access online and offline to daily STEM content through COSI Connects.
In this edition of Science Hub, we will tell you more about COSI Connects and our community outreach activities through the COSI Connects Learning Lunchbox. I hope you enjoy reading about the incredible impact your support is helping to make possible.
Many thanks for all you do to advance COSI’s mission and vision – to engage, inspire, and transform lives and communities by being the best partner in science, technology, and industry learning – we could not do it without you.
Sincerely, Frederic
Feeding Hungry Minds
In March 2020, just days after the pandemic forced our temporary building closure, we launched COSI Connects, our digital doorway for free, fun, at-home science learning. Fueled by COSI’s team of educators and community partners, COSI Connects features daily STEM lessons, educational videos, 360-degree virtual tours of COSI exhibitions, and more.
While COSI Connects brings STEM learning into the homes of anyone with an internet-connected device, we wanted to do even more to make science learning accessible to all and keep learners engaged year-round. To that end, in July 2020 we launched the COSI Connects Learning Lunchbox, an educational kit containing lessons and supplies needed to complete five STEM activities at home.
Learning Lunchboxes are designed by COSI’s expert educators in partnership with STEM leaders, such as NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. With five different Learning Lunchbox themes and more in the works, there’s sure to be a box that meets each learner’s unique curiosities.
Through public partnerships, COSI has distributed over 8,000 Learning Lunchboxes to underserved learners throughout Ohio, with thousands more planned in the coming year.
And it won’t stop there. Thanks to the AEP Foundation, COSI will distribute 12,500 energy-themed Learning Lunchboxes to underserved students in Columbus and rural communities throughout the state.
Interested in bringing COSI’s hands-on STEM learning into your home? COSI now offers COSI Connects Kits for purchase, our for-sale version of the Learning Lunchbox. More information can be found on COSI's website.
Alex Wilkins, Driver of Accessible Science Education
Alex Wilkins joined the COSI Team in 2017 first as an Intern working with our Living Collections and then as a COSI on Wheels Educator. After completing her Masters in Anthropology, rather than pursuing a Ph.D., Alex decided to go in a different direction with her career.
What Alex does at COSI has evolved over the past three years, along with COSI’s priorities. Her projects used to revolve around building ways for adults to engage with COSI. Then COVID-19 changed how we worked, and more importantly, what our community needed from us.
“Now we need to reach kids in a distance learning setting,” said Alex. “That’s obviously very different than onsite in-person adult engagement, but it’s still that same idea of targeting communities that COSI has not seen before and wants to see more of.”
It is a bit striking to think that we had previously reserved the word unprecedented almost exclusively for our partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. Now we use it primarily to describe the impact of COVID-19.
“I remember that was the first thing said to me when I started this new role,” Alex remarked. “This is unprecedented. This will all be new.”
This point didn’t give her any pause. Instead, it became a catalyst for what she went on to say.
“I’m also a student of history! I love this idea that fifty years, sixty years, seventy years from now, people will be writing books and making films. Certainly not about me. Maybe about Dr. B! And those people are going to ask. What was it like? What did you do? I can’t wait to say, I brought education and brought that same COSI spark of inspiration and transformation. That didn’t have to stop when the rest of the world was stopping. We kept going. I can’t wait to look back and say, ‘Look what we did. All these kids that could have gotten left behind? They didn’t.’”