Partnering with a Children’s Museum to Build Curiosity
The Sacramento State SPS chapter visits the McClellan Nuclear Research Facility.
Photo courtesy of the chapter.
Last year our SPS chapter at Sacramento State initiated a transformative and community-focused partnership with the Sacramento Children’s Museum (SCM). The program is a unique collaboration between university students, faculty, and a local nonprofit organization dedicated to early childhood education.
Recognizing the importance of early exposure to STEM, our SPS chapter worked with SCM leadership and faculty mentors to develop a program that empowers Sacramento State physics students to design and build interactive science exhibits for children ages 3 to 8. These exhibits aim to introduce basic scientific principles through tactile, visual, and experiential learning—ensuring that complex ideas like gravity, motion, and magnetism are accessible and fun.
To kick off the initiative, SPS members toured the museum, engaged with education coordinators, and collected feedback on existing exhibits. Then, over the semester, our student teams used this input to brainstorm and prototype new exhibit concepts, many of which were grounded in mechanics and electromagnetism. These ideas were workshopped during SPS meetings, tested in the lab, and reviewed in collaboration with museum staff for safety, accessibility, and educational value.
What makes this initiative stand out is its mutual benefit:
- For the museum, it brings new and custom-built STEM content tailored to young learners.
- For our students, it offers hands-on design and fabrication experience, collaborative project development, and opportunities to practice science communication with the public.
- For the university, it deepens community engagement and highlights the practical, human impact of a physics education.
Beyond the educational value, this program also provides paid internships for students who commit to building and maintaining exhibits over time, giving Sacramento State students valuable workforce experience in science outreach, engineering, and education. The program is poised to continue growing into a permanent fixture of our department’s outreach, offering recurring opportunities for students in physics and beyond.
As a chapter, we are incredibly proud of this initiative—both for its ambition and reach and because it reflects the spirit of service, creativity, and scientific curiosity that defines SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma. It’s an enduring example of how physics students can make science fun, accessible, and meaningful to the next generation.
