The Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin has become the first institution in Ireland to receive the Google Field Trip Grant.
The grant, announced yesterday, will allow them to cover transport and other costs associated with arranging visits from every secondary school in Ireland, even those in very rural areas.
The gallery hopes to more than double the number of annual student visitors to 5,000 by 2016 from the current level of 2,000.
Lynn Scarff, the director of Science Gallery Dublin, said: “Science Gallery Dublin’s art and science programmes provide young people with simultaneous experiences — as an artist and a scientist, a designer and an entrepreneur — allowing them to try on identities and develop the creative, flexible thinking needed for 21st-century workplaces. These interdisciplinary approaches can make science and art more accessible to a wider array of people who may not have traditionally identified with these subjects.”
The announcement of the grant coincided with the launch of the Science Gallery’s 2016 programme, which will include exhibitions on how the human brain interprets the world, the future of farming, and how the worlds of design and violence meld. The latter is a co-production with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The news of the grant is one of a series of recent successes for the gallery, which in October announced that it would be expanding overseas for the first time.