Natural History Museum http://www.nhm.ac.uk
Anyone who has been to the NHM will understand how enthusiastic it is possible to get wandering around there. Well, prepare to get enthused even more, because this is simply a great website. They’ve really gone to town on this one. It would have been pretty easy to just stick a few pictures together and leave it at that, but there’s enough in here to fill up Site-of-the-Week for …. well…. weeks.
To start with, exploring for yourself is easy - you can wander from area to area with the interactive floorplan to guide you. The whole thing is arranged well, and there’s a real emphasis on scientific thinking and finding things out. The dinosaur section has tons of information, and there’s lots of teaching resources and ideas for learning more. Then there’s QUEST (Questioning Understanding and Exploring Simulated Things) which is an interactive work-it-out-for-yourself section. Choose a specimen, then you can weigh it, date it, prod it and ask questions about it. Science at your fingertips.
Continuing the interactive learning theme, and well worth a look, are the science casebooks, which take you through some of the museum’s investigations - brilliantly, in larger than average font-size for all those budding young scientists out there. Don’t miss the 360 degree views either - you’ll need a plug-in (conveniently linked) and then, hey presto, you’re standing in front of the Diplodocus in the entrance hall. And that’s not even the half of it. The picture library lets you browse through hundreds of photos and drawings from throughout the museum, and it’s not just pokey little pictures either, you can get superb full screen detail. And that’s still not even the half of it.
Richard Northover