Exploratorium’s Wired Pier Website Challenges “Alternative Facts,” Encourages Local Environmental Awareness
The Exploratorium is launching its new Wired Pier Website this week! For the last three years, our team has been developing the site, aimed at providing public access to environmental information gathered by the network of sensors embedded across the museum’s location on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
The website provides easy to use, online tools meant to inspire educators, tinkerers, and citizen-scientists to explore and interact with environmental data collected on site.
When Exploratorium moved four years ago to its new waterfront home in 2013, the museum was designed to double as an environmental field station. The building was fitted with an array of sensors that measure patterns in San Francisco Bay’s water, weather, and atmospheric conditions.
The Wired Pier website makes the information collected accessible and understandable to the public, building on the Exploratorium’s vision of a world where people think for themselves and can confidently ask questions, question answers, and understand the world around them.
The Wired Pier was inspired in part by the science movement interested in democratizing data and making it available to all. Projects like Wired Pier encourage science literacy and counter “alternative facts” by giving people direct access to their sources. We are so excited to get people engaged and curious about the environment of the bay!
For use on mobile, the Wired Pier app uses familiar smartphone and tablet features, such as click, drag, pinch and zoom. It also allows users to easily wrangle large amounts of complicated data in a way that is useful and accessible both to young learners and seasoned scientists alike.
The Wired Pier launch is just the beginning. As user engagement increases and data grows on the site, our community of tinkerers, thinkers, and explorers across the globe will come up with new ways to use the information to provide better answers to the questions we face today.
Visit the Wired Pier Website
Read the official press release
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