Welcome to the Junior Science World blog

My name is Brian Kinghorn, and I am a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology with an emphasis on science teacher knowledge at Michigan State University. At Michigan State I have taught undergraduate courses in Educational Psychology and Elementary Science Methods. I also worked on a research project developing an online elementary heredity curriculum and teacher professional development using UC Berkeley's WISE program. Additionally I spent three years working on an NSF funded grant that involved observing and interviewing early-career secondary science teachers from across the nation to assess their needs. For my own research I have focused on how elementary and middle school teachers learn science content as they teach.

I am also an experienced extracurricular elementary science instructor. Starting in 2002 I worked for Science Adventures in many different capacities. I started as a summer science camp instructor and moved on to teaching after-school science clubs, presenting science assemblies at schools and teaching and training other instructors. I also traveled across the United States presenting week-long Science Adventures camps at US Air Force bases and traveled to Hong Kong to do the first Science Adventures camps there. The program was so well received that I was hired in late 2004 as the founding general manager of Science Adventures programs in Hong Kong, a position I held until entering graduate school.

As part of a graduate fellowship I developed the business plan for Junior Science World. The focus is to provide inquiry based elementary science programs, curriculum and professional development to an international market, with particular emphasis on underprivileged populations.

When people learn of my background they often ask me about where they can find good resources for science curriculum or good ideas for science projects or lessons. Such was the case today. A friend called me and said his sister home schools her kids and wanted to know where she could find good resources and science curriculum for teaching. I sent him a couple of links that I thought might be helpful in the few minutes I had available. On my own web browser I have quite a few very useful websites bookmarked, but I did not have the time to look through them all (or even copy and paste them all) to help my friend.

As I was talking with my wife this evening, she suggested that I develop and market curriculum and teacher development/training for parents who home school their children. That is a great idea but will take a lot of time and effort. Hopefully that will come in the near future and you'll hear about it on this blog. However, while I was thinking about that possibility, the idea for this blog came to my mind. It will hopefully become a resource that I can send to people that not only has links to sites I have found useful, but also provides a forum for me to promote inquiry science education, write about current issues in science education and have useful discussions about science education.

I hope this helps my friend's sister and and anyone else who might be interested. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress and I will be working on it in my spare time as I work on my dissertation and search for jobs. I look forward to seeing where it will go.