49ers Museum Hosts First ‘Family Learning Night’
Friday, January 9, 2015
There’s a unique goal of “Family Learning Night” at Levi’s® Stadium’s 49ers Museum presented by SONY.
Engage the adults as much as the kids.
The 90-plus children at the museum on Friday evening — at the first of six planned (and already fully-booked) editions of the event — were, of course, the students.
But the hope of museum director Jesse Lovejoy and his staff is that the parents also connect with their kids during and after the process of learning.
To accomplish this on Friday, families spent one hour participating in a hands-on, lab activity and a second hour interacting with exhibits, all the while staying specific to a STEM-centric curriculum (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
During the first hour, sitting at tables inside and out of the Denise DeBartolo York Education Center and the Chevron STEM Zone as well as the Morabito Theater, families learned about the engineering process and how it pertained to the evolution of football equipment. Use the example of the football helmet, they were told, which has come a long way from leather since the 49ers inaugural season in 1946.
Then came the first challenge: how to make a football from scratch given the hypothetical situation that there is a rubber shortage. (Even some parents might admit that they didn’t know that NFL balls have a rubber bladder to hold the air underneath all that leather.)
Group work, between kids and their parents, ensued.
Hosting the students for the museum is nothing new, of course: Staff has already welcomed more than 10,000 Bay Area students.
On Friday, it was mom and dad that went back to school.
The remaining five iterations of “Family Learning Night,” to be held monthly until June, have already been filled. Due to popularity, however, there’s a good chance of dates being added. Stay tuned.
Learn more about the initiative at www.levisstadium.com/family-learning-nights/.
