KID Museum’s Black History Month Celebration, February 4, 2024 History is being made at KID Museum, and it was notably present during our Black History Month Celebration this year. The youth who walked through our doors in February to engage with Black innovators, inventors, and makers are the ones who will shape the future with their own inventions, innovations, and creativity. At KID Museum, we deeply value the power of representation and the importance of providing our youth with a place where they belong, with examples of what’s possible. As the Senior Manager of Community and P ..read more

“I am Black History.” A young girl wrote this during KID Museum’s Black History Month Celebration this year. She’s exactly right. Black History is about the celebration of past heroes, luminaries, and traditions; but it’s also about current-day innovators and makers, and future history makers – like her. At KID Museum, we celebrate “active history”: history as an active, ongoing endeavor that we contribute to daily. Our recent Black History and Women’s History Month celebrations – and all of our heritage celebrations at the museum – incorporate active history to achieve inclusive learnin ..read more

Can math be fun? Yes! Does this translate to real results? Yes, it does. Over the summer, rising 7th graders from two schools that receive Title I funds spent three weeks learning ratios and percentages by designing cardboard carnival games, understanding angles by building and programming robots, and determining probability by coding games. Teachers told us that their students’ “attitudes [towards math] completely changed.” This is good news at a time when our students’ math scores locally and nationally are so dire. Only a shocking 24% of all Montgomery County middle schoolers are curr ..read more

There are countless moments in my work when I get to truly appreciate why I do what I do. I’m lucky that way. Because we work directly with kids, I see the impact of maker learning experiences first-hand, through the often-emotional responses of the kids, teachers, and parents themselves. Last Saturday was one of those moments.  We hosted a day-long event for Teen Innovators, a newly-developed program for high school students where they hone their skills as makers while receiving direct support from industry volunteers to understand how these skills relate to the world of work ..read more

KID Museum students, teachers, and partners were featured at a special event at the White House this week highlighting the contributions of Latinx leaders in science, technology, and space exploration. With the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, Minecraft Education (showcasing the new version of their popular LatinExplorers game), and collaborators from local school systems, KID Museum was proud to highlight innovative ways to support future generations of Latinx students to choose careers in STEM-related fields. More than 30 students from KID’s longtime partner, Parkland Middle School for ..read more

A team of eager third and fourth graders from Van Ness Elementary in southeast Washington, D.C., recently joined KID Museum Maker Educators and volunteers from Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center for hands-on experiences with robotics, programming, biology, and engineering. The field trip to KID Museum was sponsored by the Georgetown Lombardi Young Scholars Program as part of the cancer center’s ongoing community enrichment activities. Motivated by the importance of inspiring the next generation of scientists and health care workers, Georgetown Lombardi faculty ..read more

A chain reaction set off a high-energy summer at KID Museum – for kids as well as teachers and our community partners. In June, as schools were letting out, we hosted representatives from 16 local nonprofits that receive funding from the Mead Family Foundation to support under-resourced communities. To emphasize this group’s potential to catalyze change, KID maker-educators facilitated an activity to build a Rube Goldberg-like machine. Each table team created one component of the contraption, relying on the group before them and the group after to cause and sustain the reaction. Collecti ..read more

From a senior U.S. patent official to a Gen Z entrepreneur seeking her first patent, the message was clear to the middle school students who participated in KID Museum’s Invent the Future program: Anyone, at any age, can be an inventor. “Raise your hand if you’re an inventor. Every hand in this room should be up,” 19-year-old keynote speaker Dasia Taylor told the crowd gathered June 3 at the Universities at Shady Grove. “Age by no means defines when you can or cannot invent.” Taylor became an inventor when she entered her high school’s science fair and developed sutures that change color ..read more

KID Museum hosted a teacher appreciation event earlier this month, and two speakers got me thinking about artificial limitations we put on adults and kids alike. Our guests’ remarks and their own journeys illuminated what it takes to break through those self-constraints and open our minds to all we can be and do. The first moment of inspiration came from a political legend in Maryland, Isiah “Ike” Leggett, who was a Montgomery County Councilmember and then County Executive during more than 30 years in elected office. Few people would have bet on that becoming Ike’s path while he was grow ..read more

This Sunday, our partners at Verizon helped extend free access to students and families from local schools for a Family Day at KID Museum.  The Verizon Innovative Learning Initiative is designed to democratize technology, bringing new digital resources to schools and their students so that the next generation can be empowered to change the world. So far, Verizon has helped 1.5 million students at 561 schools across the country — including Montgomery County Public Schools  and DC Public Schools students at Argyle Magnet, Forest Oak, and Neelsville middle schools, as well as ..read more