The Museum is an international beacon for informal STEM education. It engages audiences through exhibits, in-person and digital programs, and curricula.

Visitors can explore 110,000 square feet of permanent exhibit space and over 700 hands-on and interactive exhibits. Museum attractions also include the Charles Hayden Planetarium, where visitors explore our universe and beyond, and the Mugar Omni Theater, which wraps audiences in larger-than-life images. Other programming includes live presentations such as Lightning!, forums, and lectures, which further enliven the Museum’s exhibits and engage visitors in lifelong learning.

The Museum also partners with schools and community groups to bring audiences in through programming like School Visits, which impact thousands of PreK-12th grade students annually—and to bring Museum staff and resources out to the community. Its Community Outreach Programs team presents engineering design challenges and other engaging, hands-on STEM activities to community partners across the Greater Boston area. Digital programming launched during the pandemic continues to engage school and family audiences through interactive experiences exploring earth, space, and life sciences; as well as a robust set of English and Spanish content accessible anytime anywhere including live, interactive presentations, podcasts, and family activities.

The changing needs of the Museum’s communities since COVID began demonstrated to the Museum’s staff that our work will be most successful and widespread if we can both bring the public into our institution to learn, while also producing content to bring out to our communities. This includes ensuring programming off-site is accessible through online channels. The Museum’s institution-wide Digital Transformation, developed in 2021 with strategic input from McKinsey and Accenture, remains one of our highest priorities as we work to create hybrid versions of our beloved exhibits and expand upon our online school, family, and Spanish programming. Through this initiative, our goal is to reach an onsite, in-school, and online audience total of 23 million people by the end of 2023, and 100 million by 2030. 

The Museum of Science works to measure its visitor experience by utilizing COVES – the Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience, a tool designed to unite museums across the country to systematically collect, analyze, and report on visitor experience data. Similarly, to measure the quality of a school field trip to the Museum, the Museum’s Research & Evaluation team established the School Visitor Experience Monitoring project within COVES. Following their visit, community members and teachers can complete an online survey about their experience. This survey tells us what brought them to the Museum and lets them rate individual exhibit experiences and provide comments on the helpfulness of staff in addition to the educational and entertainment value of their experience. 

The Museum is nationally known for its research and evaluation of Universal Design for museums; its COVES system (as described above); and participation in the National Informal STEM Education Network, a community of informal educators and scientists with over 600 partners across the country. The cities of Boston and Cambridge have recognized the Museum for its energy and sustainability efforts; Work Without Limits, a Massachusetts disability employment initiative, has named the Museum an Employer of Choice; El Planeta awarded the Museum Best Tourist Attraction for the Massachusetts Latinx population, and "Boston Magazine" named the Museum of Science the Best Family-Friendly Museum for 2021. In 2022, EiE’s newest Computer Science Essentials curriculum was announced as a CODiE Award Finalist in the Best Coding & Computational Thinking Solution category.  

COVID POLICY

Staff, interns, and volunteers will be required to show proof that they are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. The Museum will consider an exemption from the vaccine requirement if they are unable to get vaccinated due to a qualifying medical disability or a sincerely held religious objection. The Museum is not required to provide an accommodation or exemption from the vaccine requirement if doing so would pose a direct threat to others in the workplace or would create an undue hardship for the Museum.

NONDISCRIMINATION POLICY

It is the policy of the Museum of Science that all employees should be able to enjoy a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. This requires that each employee treat with courtesy and respect every other employee and individual with whom the employee has contact in the course of the employee’s employment. The Museum strictly forbids discrimination or harassment of any kind, including discrimination based race, color, religion, creed, gender, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, citizenship status, genetic predisposition or carrier status, disability, military status, status as a disabled, recently separated veteran, Armed Forces service medal veteran, or other covered veteran or any other protected status under applicable law. This policy extends to each and every level of our operation. Accordingly, any form of harassment, whether by a fellow employee, manager, supervisor, or by a third party doing business with the Museum, will not be tolerated.

 If an employee believes that they have been the subject of discrimination or harassment or that they have witnessed it in the workplace, the employee should immediately bring concerns to the attention of Human Resources, their supervisor, or any member of management with whom the employee is comfortable.