(upbeat music) - PBS Utah and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums are hosting an educator training that takes a deep dive into the mind of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Arts education coordinator, Justin Ivie, is here to talk about the upcoming Da Vinci & Nature's Blueprint Workshop.

Hi Justin.

- Hi Mary.

- Thank you for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- So this looks like a really fun one.

- Yeah, we're really excited about it.

This is a teacher training workshop for professional development that we are offering, is actually inspired by our partners here at PBS Utah coming to us about a new documentary that Ken Burns is debuting about the work of Leonardo Da Vinci.

So we thought it'd be really cool to partner with PBS to come up with some teacher trainings about the intersection of art and science and the natural world as inspired by Da Vinci's blueprints.

- What a great idea.

And I know you'll be showing clips of the documentary as part of that.

- That's right, teachers participating will get a chance to get a little sneak peek.

- All right.

Okay.

And so what kinds of things are you going to have the teachers do?

- So we have asked an amazing teaching artist, Alyssa Dixon, who is a professor of arts education at Southern Utah University to put together a series of activities that teachers can run their students through, inspired by Da Vinci's notebooks that are hands-on arts and science activities about biomimicry and things in the natural world.

So we're gonna dissect a flower, we're gonna look at seed pods, we're gonna build models of birds in flight, and we're gonna look at motion and movement in plaster casts.

It's gonna be an all day workshop for teachers where they're gonna learn really cool activities that can be adapted for students at all ages and across the curriculum.

- Oh, that's great.

I was just gonna ask you, so what ages will those be?

Some of those sound complicated.

- Yeah, we're asking teachers K through 12 are welcome, teachers in the sciences, teachers in the arts, all are gonna find activities that can be adapted to students at their age range.

- So great.

What fun.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks.

- It's so exciting to be here.

Thank you.

- And if you'd like to know more about that teacher training, Utah Division of Arts and Museums and PBS Utah, Da Vinci & Nature's Blueprint it's called, it'll be October 12th from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM at Woods Cross High School.

Just go to pbsutah.org/events, pbsutah.org/events.

I'm Mary Dickson, thanks for watching Contact.

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Hi, I'm Mary Dickson.

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