I’m part of an educational outreach team working with the new Moonshot Museum that celebrated its second birthday this fall. The museum is located in the Astrobotic: Pittsburgh Aerospace Company site on the North Shore of Pittsburgh. Astrobotic won the NASA contract to send lunar modules to the moon. In 2025 Astrobotic plans to land the Griffin in the South Pole region of the moon. My photos were used for Penn State’s Hope Moonshot program that is a permanent exhibit at the Moonshot Museum and in this WQED-TV, the PBS station in Pittsburgh, feature about the Moonshot Museum.
This winter I worked with Mike Hennessy, the Educational Outreach Director for the Moonshot Museum, Jacki Clymer, the STEM Coordinator for the Quakertown Community School District, and Jay Meyers and Tim Powers from Streamable Media on a presentation around “Cosmic Careers” for the Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference (TRETC).
I continue to work on the CoSN K-12 Driving Innovation project. CoSN presented the findings for the 2025 report on February 5, 2025. In November my colleague, Ed McKaveney, and I presented a workshop at the Educational Vanguard: Future of Work Conference at the Fred Rogers Center at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. The workshop used AI generated prompts to investigate themes at the conference through the Driving K-12 Innovation framework. In March I’ll join Ed again with our colleague, Rich Platts, to conduct another workshop at the League of Innovative Schools Convening in Pittsburgh.
I started working as an Educational Ambassador for TinkRworks, a STEAM company that transforms learners into innovators. As part of my work I’m connecting TinkRworks to projects and people in Western PA and beyond. In 2024 TinkrWorks developed several new STEAM projects including Tech-A-Sketch and TinkRsynth, which are designed to inspire STEAM learning through drawing and music. Here in the Pittsburgh region, my colleague, Zee Poerio is testing out Tech-A-Sketch with her students at St. Louise De Marillac School near Upper Saint Clair, and Aaron Sams has his students at Saint Vincent College looking at the TinkrWorks tools.
In March I journeyed to Saint Vincent College to join over 300 educators celebrating the teachings of Fred Rogers as part of the third frED Camp. It was a fun morning filled with words of wisdom, workshops, and opportunities for people to take selfies in the Fred Rogers exhibit area. I had the special honor of including a series of collages I created for Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski’s book When You Wonder, You’re Learning.
For the past three years I’ve been producing a series of slideshows, collages, photo albums and movies (see : My Gallery.) I spent a weekend in October with my family in the Laurel Highlands as my stepson, Jacob Dulberger, competed in his first Ultra Marathon. Here is my Flickr ablum with some winter scenes.
Here’s a short movie I created about my TRETC presentation, “Connecting Communities with Cosmic Careers.”