Researchers from across the Smithsonian meet online with teachers and students around the world. The presenters show how they address big questions in their fields of expertise. The interactive format allows you and your class to contribute your own ideas.

Tuesday, April 13
What does it mean to be an American? What has it meant in the past? Among the presenters is Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist whose work has uncovered details of life in the first English settlements, including a four-hundred-year-old murder mystery.

Wednesday, April 14
What can art and music tell us about the values of a culture? What can a culture tell us about the environment in which it developed? The presenters include ethnomusicologist D. A. Sonneborn and Bill Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center.

Wednesday, April 28
How big is the universe and how can we tell? Are we alone in this vastness and will we ever know? The presenters include astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, who is studying ways to detect life on planets beyond our solar system.

Thursday, April 29
How and why do we count living things? How does a healthy ecosystem contribute to our own well-being? Presenters include entomologist Christy Jo Geraci, who demonstrates a new way of precisely measuring biodiversity. Join us for this session of "beetlemania"!

Visit expert.si.edu now to sign up. You only need to register once to attend one or all sessions during the four days of the free online conference. You can log on or off as many times as you like.

Students can solve real-life problems on InterroBang, a socially networked learning game. The Smithsonian, Microsoft Partners in Learning, and Nuvana have created active learning challenges that—at varying levels of difficulty—encourage students to exercise their problem-solving skills in science, history, art, and culture. The "missions" begin on the last day of the conference, April 29, 2010. Go to playinterrobang.com.

View a complete conference schedule with dates and times so you can plan your participation. Read about the Smithsonian experts you will meet and descriptions of the problems they will be discussing with you.

Explore an online "exhibit hall" in which you'll find lesson plans, images, videos, and other related Smithsonian resources to build on your conference experience.

Visit our growing collection of previous Smithsonian educational conferences (Abraham Lincoln, Apollo Program, Climate Change). An archived version of all sessions from "Problem Solving with Smithsonian Experts" will be available within 24 hours of each session's conclusion.