“We’re definitely seeing pent up demand,” said Perot Museum CEO Dr. Linda Silver.

Schools are feeling the pressure, she said. Fifth grade science scores dropped precipitously last year. Not only was science on the back burner as schools doubled down to salvage reading and math, what science instruction did happen lacked stickiness.

“Science is best taught in a hands-on, experimental, participatory way,” Silver said. That simply couldn’t happen with half the class in remote learning, as was the case in many schools.

Teachers will be under immense pressure to help kids gain ground, and fast. With that in mind, Texas museums are presenting themselves as assets for classroom teachers by offering lesson plans and guides to help visiting classes make the most of exhibits. But with the pandemic and the more contagious Delta variant as unpredictable as ever, museums are also providing videos and other tools when field trips aren’t possible.

However they can, museum officials plan to continue promoting curiosity—an attribute they say will help kids make the most of classroom STEM instruction.

At The DoSeum, a children’s art and science museum in San Antonio, vice president of education Dr. Richard Kissel and his team are preparing a series of lesson plans based on the Texas curriculum standards.

The online lesson plans help teachers prepare for upcoming field trips, so the various exhibits can be used as, essentially, lab equipment designed to efficiently teach concepts, but also to enhance curiosity and wonder that will propel further learning.

Even as news broke of the Delta variant, Silver and her colleagues remained committed to getting kids’ hands onto STEM experiences this year. Unlike the chaotic cancellations and unknowns of spring 2020, Silver said, the museum has contingency plans ready to go, and they are good ones.

In fact, some of the tools they developed specifically for the pandemic will continue no matter what Delta has in store. “We’re planning for multiple scenarios,” she said.

If schools don’t conduct field trips this year, the Perot Museum will still reach around 300,000 students through its outreach programs. Hands-on STEM projects often require more materials and staff than low-cost afterschool programs can afford, so the museum sends TECH Trucks (Tinker, Engineer, Create, and Hack) to providers around the Dallas area. During the pandemic the TECH Trucks also distributed Wonderkits, take-home boxes with projects and experiments the kids could do at home.

It’s okay if some science education happens outside the classroom, Silver said. That’s been the case since long before the pandemic. She cited several on the role of informal education in giving kids the kind of positive science experience that leads to a lifelong love, even a career, in STEM fields. Elementary school seems to be the prime time for those experiences, .

Of course, this begs the question of equity, and who does and does not have access to these informal positive experiences, especially if field trips go away again.

With reduced capacity and safety protocols, the Perot Museum plans to stay open for now, and even if field trips cannot happen safely, family visits have been operating safely since last summer.

The Perot Museum wants more families to take advantage of the experience, especially those who might not see themselves as the museum’s target audience.

Working with 16 community partners like the North Texas Food Bank and neighborhood groups, the museum has given free memberships to 5,000 Dallas-area families. The partners usually organize the first group trip to the Perot Museum, and Silver said, many come back again, and bring their kids.

That first trip is key, she explained, because it breaks down the non-financial barriers around culture and education level that might be keeping families away.

Right now participants in the community partner program make up about 10 percent of the museum’s daily attendance, along with those who qualify for $1 admission anyone who can show proof that they are enrolled in a public assistance program.

Whether or not informal visits and field trips can happen during the surge in Delta variant cases, Texas students are learning in person, and museums are prepared to help teachers cultivate curiosity and wonder in the classroom.

The Perot Museum has produced a bilingual science show, the . Each episode covers topics required by Texas curriculum standards for a given grade range, and is available for free on the museum’s website. So far the program has around 60,000 subscribers.

Silver said, and the museum is offering it to schools across the state. Even though a show is not necessarily hands-on, the Whynauts episodes create whimsical narratives with real world uses for things kids will learn in the classroom.

Since it opened in 2015, The DoSeum has provided professional learning opportunities for teachers to cultivate curiosity and excitement in their classrooms. In addition to numerous single day programs, this year The DoSeum joined with several other local museums to form the Museo Institute, where 40 teachers per year will learn the various tools and techniques used in informal learning environments.

The teachers learn not only how to make the most of a field trip, but also how to translate the methods back to the classroom.

With a “slight flip” in how it’s taught, Kissel said, so much is possible in STEM education.

“If you don’t have (curiosity and wonder) you’re not going to get as far as you’d like,” Kissel said. It can be difficult, he knows, because the content and history of science — definitions, names of scientists, etc. — is only the beginning.

Even more critical is the ongoing process of understanding, he said. The more interested students are, the more of that content they will appreciate and absorb.

Even though these open-ended, inquiry based experiences are important, Kissel said, teachers need not feel the same pressure they feel with regard to getting grade-level content in front of kids. Kids aren’t “falling behind” in wonder and curiosity. In his experience as a researcher and educator, he said, “Scientists are simply those kids who never stopped asking, ‘why?’”

The scientific process can come alive for any kid at any time, he said, and museums will be there to light the fire.

“(Space) is an interest that most people enjoy,” Maximos said, “Everybody has a little curiosity in it whether it’s a little bit or a lot.”

Maximos, 14, along with a couple dozen other high school students, spent one Thursday in August at the Williams Indoor Pool, tucked in a cozy neighborhood just a few miles from Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of NASA Johnson Space Center. It’s the same pool where the last two classes of NASA astronauts have obtained their SCUBA licensing, a mandatory component of astronaut training.

During their day at the pool, Maximos and her classmates at the weeklong Space Center UÂŽ program completed challenges in engineering and robotics, working in teams inside and outside the pool. Experts say these skills, and the love of STEM, are best developed in hands-on environments so many students went without last school year when remote learning, COVID-19 protocols, and truncated curricula made labs and field trips impossible.

“There were so few positive experiences,” said Daniel Newmyer, vice president of education for Space Center Houston. Teachers did what they could, but he knows they too were frustrated by the limitations. Space Center Houston is committed to helping students reignite their love of science, and to fan the flames of those, like Maximos, who have their sights set on all kinds of STEM fields. “These informal learning opportunities activate, or in this case reactivate, learning in the classroom.”

Informal learning abounds at Space Center Houston. The hands-on museum is open for field trips, families. Explorer Camps for younger students ran throughout the summer, and Space Center UÂŽ, for children 11-18, runs year round. Science clubs and school groups from around the world make up most of their school year attendance. Individuals like Maximos can join sessions as well, as their schedule permits.

While the more well-known Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama focuses on the astronaut experience, Space Center UÂŽ incorporates the many other STEM fields required to put humankind into space. NASA has always had its eyes on space, Newmyer said, but he regularly reminds students of all the earthbound innovation it has spurred along the way.

The day at the pool is a perfect example of the broad range of skills and content the Space Center UÂŽ students explore. On one side of the large garage-like building, a few pods of teenagers learned to use SCUBA equipment under the guidance of professional diving instructors. Once they knew how to breathe through regulators and manage their bright yellow oxygen tanks, they culled the bottom of the pool for painted rocks symbolizing nitrogen, hydrogen and other elements that make up the atmosphere of an imaginary planet.

They resurfaced from their mission, analyzed the rocks they had seen, and created a report detailing whether or not the imaginary planet could support life.

In addition to the biology and chemistry content, the exercise is designed to stoke imagination. The quest to find another habitable planet has occupied the mind of science fiction writers and NASA scientists for decades. Earlier that week at Space Center Houston, the students visited a special exhibit dedicated to the future of space exploration, in particular, the hunt for signs of life on Mars.

On the other end of the pool, Maximos and her team stood at the edge, navigating the underwater drone to collect data from laminated pieces of paper under the water. This sort of challenge, along with coding exercises earlier in the week, were particularly appealing to Maximos, the aspiring obstetrician.

“I know a lot of doctors nowadays are using robotics and robots,” Maximos said, “So learning how to code them could help me in surgery when I grow up.”

Once they had finished with the drone, Maximos’s group joined several other teams building robotic boats to ferry ping pong balls across the surface of the pool. Other than a mechanical core, the materials for the boat were far from high-tech — they included popsicle sticks, plastic bags, and the fasteners best known as “chip clips.” Once completed, all the teams would race the length of the pool.

The teams quickly realized that coming to the water with a finished product on the first try was not an efficient or rewarding use of their time and materials. Instead, most made repeated trial runs with various pieces and parts, studying the way the friction of the water affected each component. They assembled, disassembled, reassembled and tweaked their creations continuously.

They were, in many ways, learning from failure.

That’s science, Newmyer said, learning from what goes right and from what goes wrong. He wants the students to experience “the positive emotions associated with productive struggle.”

In other words: he wants them to fall in love with the doing of science, not just the end result.

As an educator, he understands the need for tests and content mastery, which schools will no doubt be laser focused on as they address the huge learning loss of the pandemic. However, a large part of scientific education is about questions that can’t be put on a test, because no one knows the answer. Engineering a lab exercise to create, say, a volcano can teach content about acids and bases. However, the process of asking “what happens when I combine elements that have never been combined?” or “How do I get a result no one has ever gotten before?” are also science. That pursuit, he said, is as much about the attempts that don’t get the expected results as the ones that do.

“It’s just dreaming and thinking as big as you possibly can,” Newmyer said.

That kind of learning takes time, which is what Space Center UÂŽ provides, and to the best of their ability, he said, they try to provide it equitably.

The kids at the pool were racially and culturally diverse, and the Space Center U program can be adapted for hearing impairment and sensory processing disorders. Also, Newmeyer emphasized, the kids need not be science prodigies. It is designed to appeal to any ability level. “It’s about moving them forward wherever they are.”

That said, he acknowledged, it is a paid program. The multi-day program offers both virtual and in-person experiences ranging between $149.95 and $674.95 per student per week depending on the size of the group and the accommodations. For schools and parents to make that kind of investment, most of the students have a pretty well-developed interest in STEM subjects.

He hopes the Explorer Camps, visits to the museum at Space Center Houston, and outreach programs with Houston area after school programs will stoke some of that early interest. Extracurricular learning took a hard hit during the pandemic, and the Delta variant has everyone on edge about the near future.

Every program at Space Center Houston is taking precautions, said Space Center Houston communications supervisor Meridyth Moore, but they are determined to continue offering something to spark curiosity, and to cultivate the increased interest from private endeavors like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic in the news.

Virtual programming was part of that during the initial coronavirus pandemic, but actually, Moore said, if anyone is able to turn a pandemic into a learning opportunity, it’s Space Center Houston.

During the pandemic, Space Center U® was able to create a full simulation of the kind of quarantining required to keep astronauts healthy before they go into space. Kids dressed in full “” coveralls from head to toe learned how to create sterile environments, conduct experiments with heightened safety protocols, and work as a team through layers of personal protective equipment.

While it may not come to that again, Moore said, Space Center U® is committed to finding innovative and creative opportunities, whatever the constraints. “We’re in the business of awe and wonder.”