The Australian Museum's new virtual project is basically the educational equivalent of hiding vegetables in your kids' spaghetti – they'll learn a whole lot without even realising how it happened. Sydney's leading natural history museum has flung open its virtual doors with new portal, Inside Out, bringing a raft of online exhibitions and projects to your budding scientists, geologists and explorers.
If the thought of finding enough livestreams to fill the days of the upcoming school holidays fills you with mild dread, the Australian Museum might have you covered. For learning with a dose of fun, children can explore the Museum's range of 3D models made through photogrammetry: a process which involves taking hundreds of photos of an object which are then 'solved' into one three-dimensional picture. Its specificity allows the natural textures and light of objects to come through. You can explore priceless Egyptian mummy collections, deep sea angler fish and the first mammal declared to have gone extinct because of climate change. Families can also watch birds-eye footage of treacherous explorations and keep abreast of the latest in scientific research, events and podcasts.
The Curated for the Curious collection has been designed in part with teachers and home-schooling in mind, with information and fact sheets for those wanting to check up on how much knowledge their tutees have retained: they cover everything from your kids' favourite creepy-crawlies, fossils, unusual bugs, minerals, natural ecosystems and fascinating animal lifecycles.
Even cooler? The Citizen Science projects, where everyone can take part in crowd-sourced researched projects. Get the little ones stuck into FrogID, a national frog count and rescue mission which allows little citizen scientists to record frogs for identification by Australian Museum scientists. The #CapturingClimateChange exhibition, an online photographic exhibition which invites the public to submit photos that capture the impacts of climate change close to home, is also one to get involved in.