Technological learning was in full swing for the lower school’s grade 5 class during a recent class field trip to the Intel Museum.

This past October, fifth graders visited the museum, conveniently located near Harker at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. The museum has exhibits of Intel’s products and history as well as semiconductor technology in general.

The museum got its start in the early 1980s as an internal project to record Intel history. It opened to the public in 1992, and was expanded in 1999 to triple its size and add a store. Today the museum has exhibits about how semiconductor chip technology works and is a popular destination for gradeschool educational programs. Intel is especially relevant to many students at Harker, who live in the area or have parents who work in Silicon Valley’s high tech industry.

Lisa Diffenderfer, an assistant director of instructional technology at Harker, said that prior to the outing students had been shown an interactive presentation on “Writing Good Emails.” Viewed on a projector as a whole class activity, the lesson (via a journey with Gmail) taught students what occurs when you send out an email. Taking a behind-the-scenes look at what happens “after you click send,” the students were treated to an insider’s view of data centers through videos, photos and more.

Both the interactive classroom presentation and field trip provided informative and fun ways to get students plugged into and invested in learning more about the quickly growing, ever changing, increasingly global world of high tech.