Mission Science Workshop began as a place for founder and director Dan Sudran to satisfy his own curiosity about how things work. By 1991, his garage was equipped with various instruments (oscilloscopes, microscopes, meters), rocks, fossils, and animal bones, which captured the imaginations of neighborhood kids, who began to come in and look around. He was surprised and encouraged at the children’s curiosity about things, because he was mostly used to seeing them spending their after school and summer time on their bicycles, or shooting off firecrackers. Watching children’s natural curiosity in action was fascinating to him, and gave him the idea of converting his home-centered self-education project into a public science space available to Mission neighborhood children. Today, we find that our own growth as science teachers continues to be driven by children’s questions and excitement as they are exposed to new experiences with nature and the world both inside and outside the workshop. The concept developed by Mission Science Workshop—of combining making and building in a shop with exploring and experimenting in a science lab/museum—has been replicated in a number of other areas in California and throughout the United States through National Science Foundation (NSF) grants of 1995 (California dissemination) and 2000 (national dissemination). These NSF grants provided three-year startup grants to develop workshops modeled after the Mission Science Workshop.