Audio Transcript

Published: April 28, 2018
APA 7 Citation: Newsome, B. (Host). (2018, April 28). Ep.51 California Academy of Sciences Virtual Field Trips [Audio podcast transcript]. Fizzics Education.
https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/podcast/fizzicsed/california-academy-of-sciences-virtual-field-trips/

Ben Newsome CF is the recipient of the 2023 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and a Churchill Fellow. He is a global leader in science communication and the founder of Fizzics Education.

[00:00:00]
Jacque Benitez: Learning a lot about different types of sciences has helped me a lot. Like I said, my background was in physics and astronomy, and now I’m teaching about penguins and the life cycle of a butterfly, and just broadening your knowledge of different sciences is definitely helpful. Or if you happen to be in a different type of field, I know there’s art museums and there’s history museums that do this as well. Get a broad sense of your discipline.

[00:00:30]
Jacque Benitez: The second thing is being really comfortable about talking to somebody who might not actually respond.

[00:00:38]
Announcer: Jacque Benitez is an education specialist for the California Academy of Sciences distance learning programme. Her mission is to guarantee that every K to 8 grade student has the opportunity to explore and explain their world, no matter where they are.

[00:00:51]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:01:07]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. Big week this week! We’re speaking with a friend of ours, Jacqueline Benitez, from the California Academy of Sciences. A distance learning specialist who very much teaches not just kids in California, we’re talking kids all over North America and beyond. It’s not just in schools; we’re talking juvenile justice centres, hospitals, you name it. If there’s an audience she can connect with, she certainly does so. Let’s listen in to what Jacque’s been doing and maybe you might be able to think how you can connect your students as well.

[00:01:37]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:39]
Jacque Benitez: I am actually coming from the California Academy of Sciences, which is in San Francisco, California. We’re in Golden Gate Park, so I get a beautiful view of nature all around me all day, which is absolutely wonderful. We are a science museum that has a living rainforest, a planetarium, and an aquarium all under one living roof. We get to explore the natural world around us a lot, and that gives us a great opportunity to be able to fly off into outer space and look at what’s going on out there, and stay here at home and explore not only what’s living on the actual land but also what’s living in the seas.

[00:03:44]
Jacque Benitez: It’s really cool to be exploring all these different things. In fact, our mission here at the Academy is to explore, explain, and sustain life on Earth. One of the ways we do this is actually through our distance learning programme, which is really fun.

[00:04:03]
Ben Newsome: Wow, so you’re really describing a terrible place to work that’s austere and filled with concrete and you’d never want to be there ever again.

[00:04:13]
Jacque Benitez: No, never ever! It’s absolutely wonderful. I get to have a place where we get to go down into the aquarium and I can see cuttlefish and a huge, large coral reef tank. Then in the next minute, I can walk up into our living rainforest where I feel like I’m actually in a rainforest, which is absolutely wonderful and hot at the same time. So on those cold San Francisco days, I get to warm up there.

[00:04:45]
Ben Newsome: That sounds gorgeous. What an awesome place to go to. I must say, I’ve been to San Francisco before but I never popped in. I kind of feel bad now.

[00:04:56]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah, you definitely should come next time you’re in the city. But if you actually don’t have the opportunity to come to the California Academy of Sciences, we have a wonderful distance learning programme where we can actually bring the Academy to you, including some of these animals that live here.

[00:05:13]
Ben Newsome: Now Jacque, that’s very much your remit. That’s exactly what you get up to, and I know that you’ve been doing this for many years. What got you into that sort of thing?

[00:05:23]
Jacque Benitez: My background is in physics and astronomy. I started learning a lot about the stars and our universe, and then I started wondering about all the different other parts of the Academy. At the same time, the Academy started this new programme called distance learning, where they wanted to reach students that actually couldn’t physically come to the Academy, whether it was because of transportation, it was too expensive, it was too far, or their classroom just couldn’t take field trips. They wanted to have this idea of being able to virtually bring the Academy to them.

[00:06:44]
Jacque Benitez: That’s when we started our distance learning programme in 2013. We were able to figure out that this new technology of video conferencing was getting easier and easier. What if we brought the Academy into the classroom via something like a Skype interview? That’s where it all started and brainstormed from there. We started off with a couple of different pilot programmes where we were trying to figure out what teachers want to learn about here at the Academy. Was it our animals? Was it our scientists? In fact, we do have over 300 different scientists working here in all different types of sciences.

[00:08:09]
Jacque Benitez: From there, we were able to branch out and figure out that our penguins are very popular. We get a chance to use our live webcams to look into those penguins’ exhibit and see what they’re doing right then and then. Also, we realised that just being in front of a scientist and being able to talk to a scientist is a big reward as well. We tried to create programmes where not only do we highlight a science career, but we also ask the students to become scientists themselves and actually be able to do the science skills that our scientists here do every day.

[00:08:55]
Ben Newsome: That’s awesome. By the sounds of it, your programme really has grown and grown. How many are you actually offering here? It sounds like a bunch.

[00:09:06]
Jacque Benitez: We have two different flavours of programmes that we offer throughout the school year. One is what we call this one-on-one virtual programme. That’s an intimate programme where an Academy educator will be able to Skype into your classroom and talk directly to your students. We get to both be on video camera, we both have microphones, we get to have a conversation back and forth, which is really fun to have. Then there’s this other flavour what we call broadcast style programme, or sometimes you hear them as live streaming.

[00:10:21]
Jacque Benitez: This is when an Academy educator is on screen and is broadcasting to many different schools all at the same time. Everybody gets to use a chat box to let us know what they’re thinking. It’s really cool to be able to have actually other classes talking to other classes around the country at the exact same time and learning all different types of sciences. For those programmes, we usually have those about 12 to 15 times a year. Depending on the time of year, it’ll be maybe a Halloween programme where we’re looking at spooktacular skulls, or it might be like this month where we have a weather and climate programme where we’re going to be looking at weather patterns and climate patterns and being able to be climatologists and meteorologists and have the opportunity to predict weather patterns, which will be really fun.

[00:11:58]
Ben Newsome: That’s incredibly diverse. In fact, I kind of always wonder when I speak with someone that does so many things like this, if you had to just say this interview ends and you’ve got a class on, and you got to choose whatever class you wanted to do, what’s been the interaction with students that totally worked? The best experiment where you go, the kids just light up every single time you do it?

[00:12:23]
Jacque Benitez: I would have to say there’s two that pop out the most. One is actually looking at live animals and the interactions they have with the world around them is something really big. Like our kindergarten programme where we look at African penguins that we have here at the Academy. We look into our exhibit and I ask them to take a look at what are some of the things you notice about how they move, how they’re using their body parts to help them either eat or swim. That’s really engaging. Also, to be able to have them act like penguins, which is a lot of fun. Not only are they having fun, they’re getting their wiggles out, but they’re also mimicking those animals and being able to really see how those animals use their body parts to be able to waddle around our exhibit.

[00:14:05]
Jacque Benitez: Looking really closely at animals and their different body parts is one. Then the other one is what we try to do with our older students is always have some hands-on activity. For example, of course, like I said, I have an astronomy background, I love our Impacts in the Solar System programme where we actually do a scale model activity where we have maps where we see either Golden Gate Park and can recognise some actual city blocks and houses. We put those asteroids that we’ve been talking about and place them on the maps and actually get to see how big these objects really are. Being able to show that scale model is a lot of fun as well.

[00:15:26]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. In fact, there’s this experiment which would go with that and I love doing with students, which is getting a big tray of flour and then sprinkling really finely ground coffee powder all over it. Over here, I’d try and use Milo because hey, I like the chocolate. But you’ve got that all over it and you get the kids to drop different size rocks onto it. It’s amazing how similar those impact craters can look to the real thing.

[00:15:49]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah, definitely! And being able to see also with some of our planetarium software, we’ve been able to map out their orbits and see what is the likelihood of them actually being able to hit each other or leave debris in their paths. Is it likely that they’re going to be impacted because of that? Just asking those questions and looking at actual data is a lot of fun as well.

[00:16:14]
Ben Newsome: Well, actually that just gets me. Obviously the California Academy of Sciences, you’re going to do science, but I must say, thinking about trajectories, do you get many classes who are studying mathematics and go, we actually want to have your programme fit our mathematics outcomes? Because I’d imagine that if you’re talking data and that sort of thing, there’s a lot that teachers and students could do.

[00:16:34]
Jacque Benitez: There definitely is. I actually haven’t personally had any maths classes come to us, but I have had some English classes come to us before where actually a class down in Mexico, they had their English class and they wanted to combine their English class with science as well. We did a programme about our penguins and they were able to practise their English at the same time as learning some science. We’ve also had the opportunity where we have one of our most famous penguins, Pierre the Penguin, has a book actually about him.

[00:17:53]
Ben Newsome: Brilliant!

[00:17:54]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah! And so we’ve combined a reading lesson with science as well and have that programme. It’s called Science Story Time here at the Academy.

[00:18:06]
Ben Newsome: No, that’s really, really cool. Because I know that we’ve done connections to South Korean students, they’re in high school, and I am amazed just how well they do it considering. Imagine trying to do science in another language, and especially at the time they chose a human body programme, so there’s a lot of Latin in that.

[00:18:27]
Jacque Benitez: Oh my gosh! That’s even a whole ‘nother level there.

[00:18:31]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I know. I was going, oh my gosh, and these students were just smashing it. It was so cool to see. I love the fact that you’re meshing in stuff around your own programmes, the penguins and especially around the book that you’ve written. That’s really cool and has outcomes that go far beyond just the distance learning class itself.

[00:18:46]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah, definitely. And then also the great opportunity here at the Academy of Sciences is we actually have bilingual educators. We have one educator that does speak Spanish, and we also have another educator that speaks Mandarin and Cantonese. We can actually offer these programmes as well not only in English, but in those other languages on top of having this wonderful variety. If you happen to have a class that is an immersion class or is a bilingual class, we can also bring our classes there depending on their schedule.

[00:20:05]
Ben Newsome: That’s really cool. In fact, I know there’s a few museums and places and we had to do it once as well where we’ve run some programmes for schools for the deaf. You’ll have a signer going along and it’s just brilliant. The ability to have this extra narrative going on underneath is unreal. Love it, love it, love it! So what sort of, obviously you’ve got a lot of programmes and you’ve grown out of 2013 into this big thing. Where do you think the future’s heading for your distance learning programmes?

[00:20:38]
Jacque Benitez: Even though it seems like we’ve been here for a long time, we’re still trying to grow as a programme, make sure that people know about us and that we do provide this programme. But I think also just experimenting in different ways of how do we use distance learning not only as just a one-off programme where we come into your classroom, we are able to give you a lesson then we’re out of there. What is something that we can do that kind of can go maybe do two programmes with us? Like our weather programme this month we’re testing out.

[00:21:59]
Jacque Benitez: We’re talking for one day about weather and weather patterns, and then we want to build on that. Okay, now that we know about weather, how does climate and looking at climate differ from actual weather prediction? And how do we use weather to make a prediction of what our climate’s going to be in the future? So kind of that idea of creating these kind of building blocks. That way you don’t have to just see me once in the year and then our interaction is done. Maybe there’s a project we can do together and have multiple classes working on one project or one science engineering activity to help create something and then we can have multiple classrooms come in.

[00:23:18]
Jacque Benitez: There’s a lot of different ways that distance learning can actually bring different classrooms together and also build ideas on top of each other, which I’m really excited to explore.

[00:23:37]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. Having students teach students about what they’ve been doing is just awesome. Let’s be honest, as a student, I was more interested in what other students had to say a lot of ways.

[00:23:51]
Jacque Benitez: Definitely!

[00:23:52]
Ben Newsome: It’s really cool. Actually, just out of interest and I often find that people who do a lot of distance learning, they often have a story somewhere where something has not quite gone quite right. Just out of interest, have you ever had a situation where it’s just, describe to me not so much the lesson but other things that affected the lesson so to speak?

[00:24:14]
Jacque Benitez: There’s definitely a lot of things. One is always your internet bandwidth. That’s always something that you’re going to have to struggle with no matter where you are. There’s been times where all of a sudden here at the Academy our bandwidth went out for some reason. I never quite got the correct answer on that from our IT person, but it does happen. So there’s always usually a contingency policy where I ask students to always look at something to be able to make some more observations if I happen to have to leave.

[00:25:34]
Jacque Benitez: There’s definitely been fire alarms that have gone off in the middle of a programme and all of a sudden they have to leave. That’s always fun. There’s also been where a student has actually lost their tooth in the middle of our programme.

[00:25:50]
Ben Newsome: Lost their tooth! I’ve had someone throw up, but not lose a tooth.

[00:25:54]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah, that was an interesting one. Luckily there wasn’t a lot of blood and the teacher just escorted that student out of the room, dealt with it, and I was there by myself with all the students. You just have to continue on. Luckily this was a really good class and I was able to pick out students to share out where normally I would rely on the teacher to choose students to share out. It worked out really well.

[00:26:26]
Ben Newsome: It’s amazing what happens. I was speaking with Karen from the Australian Museum who does a lot of this as well, and she recounts this day when she had a series of events all through the day for this particular programme she was running. One by one by one, the schools dropped out. What was actually happening was this massive thunderstorm just rolling down the coast of Australia and it was taking them all out one by one. You literally could plot them out.

[00:26:52]
Jacque Benitez: That is interesting! Oh, okay.

[00:26:54]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s happened. I mean, I’ve had certainly fire alarms and bits and pieces. I once had a loose bat.

[00:27:01]
Jacque Benitez: Oh!

[00:27:02]
Ben Newsome: So a bat had got into the classroom during the session. And I go, “Wow, this is pretty impressive.” It was moving fast enough that it was pixelating on the camera, so I couldn’t quite see what it was. But that was kind of cool. It does happen. Obviously, in the States, you have snow days. We don’t have that so much anymore as well, but you’ve got to allow for anything.

[00:27:04]
Jacque Benitez: Yeah, exactly. It’s funny being here in California—and I’m actually a California girl, I’ve never lived anywhere else—when schools call me up on the East Coast or even the Midwest sometimes and they’re like, “Yeah, so we don’t have a programme today, it’s a snow day.” I’m like, “Oh right, those things.” It doesn’t even register with me sometimes.

[00:27:26]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I think I’ve had a dusting of snow on top of me but never really stayed on the ground. That’s the most cold I’ve ever dealt with. We do heat down here! That’s what we do. Obviously you do a lot of stuff to schools, but it’s not the only user group that is around. What other places have you connected with?

[00:27:42]
Jacque Benitez: No, there’s definitely a lot of other places that we have. We’ve done after-school programmes with schools in the East Coast and the Midwest. We’ve also done summer programmes as well, where we’ve had summer camps join us for programmes like that. We’ve also actually had a juvenile detention area that has joined us for a programme, and that was really interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What types of virtual programmes does the California Academy of Sciences offer?
The Academy offers two main formats: “one-on-one” virtual programmes that allow for direct, two-way video and audio interaction between an educator and a single classroom, and “broadcast-style” programmes (or live streams) where an educator reaches many schools simultaneously, using a chat box for real-time engagement.

How are live animals integrated into the virtual sessions?
The Academy utilises live webcams, such as those in the African penguin exhibit, to allow students to observe animal behaviour as it happens. Students are encouraged to notice how animals use specific body parts to move or eat, and they often mimic these movements—like waddling—to better understand animal biology.

Can these programmes support students who speak languages other than English?
Yes. The Academy employs bilingual educators who can deliver sessions in Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. This makes the distance learning programmes accessible to bilingual and immersion classrooms, as well as international schools.

How does the Academy make complex topics like astronomy hands-on for remote students?
For programmes like “Impacts in the Solar System,” students engage in scale-modelling activities. They use maps of familiar locations, like Golden Gate Park, to visualise the actual size of asteroids and look at real-time data to understand planetary trajectories and the likelihood of cosmic impacts.

What happens if there are technical issues or interruptions during a live session?
Contingency plans are always in place for issues like bandwidth fluctuations. Jacque mentions that educators are prepared for surprises, ranging from fire alarms and internet outages to students losing teeth or even loose bats entering the classroom during a broadcast!

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Sequential Learning Model
Instead of treating a virtual excursion as a standalone event, educators should consider a “building block” approach. By scheduling multiple sessions that transition from basic observations (like daily weather) to complex analysis (like long-term climate patterns), students can construct a more cohesive and sophisticated understanding of scientific systems.

Science as a Universal Language
Jacque’s experience with bilingual sessions and “Science Story Time” suggests that scientific observation can be a powerful tool for language acquisition. Educators can use the visual and interactive nature of virtual field trips to support literacy and English as a Second Language (ESL) outcomes, using the shared experience of nature to build vocabulary.

Reaching Nontraditional Learning Environments
Distance learning isn’t just for the standard classroom. The Academy successfully reaches juvenile justice centres, hospitals, and remote rural areas in Alaska. This highlights the potential for digital outreach to provide high-quality educational equity to students in austere or isolated environments who cannot access traditional museum visits.