Last week I had the opportunity to attend the free Wednesday admission at The Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. When approaching the Academy with Jeremy and Cystyle we were astound on how many people there were, but luckily we saw Lauren and she let us in line, so we could get into the place. We were waiting in line for about 20 minutes tops, which was not bad considering the line that wrapped around Golden Gate Park.

Long Line

Map

Once we got in to the Academy, we got tickets to the 3D bug show and the Planetarium. This was exciting because I have heard so much about the Planetarium and wanted to see what this was all about.

While walking through and observing the many interactions this place provides with nature and learning, there were a couple of multimedia integrations that I thought were interesting.

One: was a kiosk that had a Google Earth Quiz to test our knowledge about how much we really know about our planet that we live on. The sad thing was that we did not get to many answers right, but we took away knowledge on what were the right answers, which was nice. To reinforce this exhibits content there were short documentaries playing.

Short Documentaries about our Earth

Jeremy Interacting with Google Earth Quiz

Feedback on how we are doing

Two: was another touch screen in front of the observatory room that was very interactive, it had video, sound, and really engaged the viewer with short interviews and documentaries of what these scientist research. This

Looking at the many Scientist and listening to their explanations

One place that was lacking interaction was the Naturalist Center, but there were real animals that had been preserved which I thought was great to see and very interesting. A way they could boost the interaction and level of learning to the next level is to have mini kiosks that relate to each of the species or artifacts that are presented with numbers to explain and engage the visitors with audio and video. Maybe something similar to the Google Earth quiz to reinforce the knowledge that the visitor just learned.

Naturalist Center

Human Skull

Skull

Last week after Justin and I presented the WordPress classroom, someone SQL injected our site during the week, which messed parts of our database and main page of our site. This was a huge problem! So, after talking to Justin, we figured a solution to look at what exactly happened in the Database.

I conducted a SQL Dump then took a look at the tables within the database in Sequel Pro. We found out that someone changed the admin email, the path of the home page, and moved certain information needed for the other blogs.

Our next step is to reinstall all of our blogs and information and have a hacker proof site!

For the past week I have been designing the WordPress Classroom with Justin Mahon and thinking of new approaches on how to implement good design to enhance the experience of the whole site. This has been a very challenging and interesting process to integrate WordPress and Buddy Press to create a center for people to start learning WordPress and contribute or to any other topics the users might want to learn. Start your own classroom or become a contributor now! Here is the link to the live site.

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