How a Museum in Rural Wyoming Reaches Students on Six Continents

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West sits in Cody, Wyoming — a small city in the high desert, miles from any major population centre, encircled by mountains and cut off from much of the country by winter.

It is not, in the obvious sense, an easy place to reach. And yet, since 2013, the museum’s virtual field trip programme has connected more than 275,000 students to its galleries, collections, and educators — from classrooms on the East Coast of America to schools in Mexico, Canada, and beyond.

At the Museums & Schools Summit 2026, the Center’s education team shared how that programme started, how it grew, and what it actually looks like in practice — for the staff delivering it as much as the students receiving it.

Starting Small, in the Right Direction

When the Centre’s education team first began thinking about virtual outreach, the problem was straightforward: geography. Around 5,000 students a year can make it into the building in person — a modest figure for a museum with five distinct collections, but one that reflects the reality of rural Wyoming. Distances are long. Winters are harsh. School trips are complicated and expensive.

“Being in a rural area, we only get about 5,000 students a year that can come into the building because of the distances in Wyoming,” explained Gretchen Henrich, who was director of education when the programme launched. The team began looking for ways to extend their reach — and discovered Skype in the Classroom, a platform connecting teachers with museums, authors, and other presenters who wanted to reach classrooms remotely.

They started modestly, in May 2013, adapting their existing onsite tours for the virtual format. By December, they had reached 70 classrooms. The demand was unmistakably there.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Today, the programme runs at considerable scale. Five staff members currently deliver around 30 virtual field trips every week, serving approximately 30,000 students a year. The milestone of 300,000 students reached since launch is imminent.

The technical setup is deliberately accessible. Educators working in the galleries need only an iPad, using it to move through the spaces, bring objects up close, and flip the camera between artefacts and their own face to maintain the sense of connection with a class. A purpose-built studio — the Innovation Lab, created at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — gives staff a more controlled environment for hands-on demonstrations, allowing them to bring physical objects into sessions in a way that’s harder to manage on the gallery floor.

Ruby Gray, the museum’s interactive programmes educator, is clear about what makes these sessions work. Before diving into content, she starts by finding out what students already know. “I’ll ask if they’ve been learning about this subject in their classrooms already,” she explains. “If I know where they are based, I’m able to give them a really curated lesson that’s based around what they already know, what they need to know, and what relates to the land that they themselves are living on.” The aim is a conversation, not a lecture — and the five to ten minutes left for questions at the end, Gray says, is consistently the highlight. “Pretty much every time there’s still hands raised when the teacher has to shut us off. And I think that’s just the best part because it kind of shows that the experience is working.”

Five Museums, Many Angles

The Centre of the West is unusual in housing five distinct museums under one roof: the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum, the Whitney Western Art Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, and the Plains Indian Museum. The virtual field trip programme draws on all of them, giving educators a breadth of content that can be tailored to almost any curriculum.

In the Whitney Western Art Museum, educator Denise leads a session called Journey Into Art that works with students from kindergarten through to high school — and even, she notes, with preschool children. The session is reshaped on the fly depending on what a teacher wants their class to get out of it: the elements of art for younger students, historical connections to European traditions for older ones, or an exploration of expression and personal meaning for those studying more advanced concepts. Two paintings of the same Yellowstone view — one a bright, classical rendering, the other painted from an angle no member of the public is allowed to reach, under a stormy sky streaked with the artist’s private journal entries — become a starting point for conversations about perspective, feeling, and what an artist brings of themselves to their work.

Heather Bender, the museum’s native education outreach specialist, developed a field trip called Buffalo and Westward Expansion, which frames the period of westward expansion and manifest destiny through the eyes of Indigenous peoples and the buffalo herds that sustained them — a deliberate counterweight to more familiar narratives. “One of the things I love most about virtual field trips is getting to travel all over the world,” she says. “It’s really cool to see school kids on the East Coast and Mexico, up in Canada and find out what their interests are and make connections with them.”

Then there are the birds. Chloe Winkler, who works with the museum’s Raptor Experience, brings live falcons and owls into her virtual sessions — including feeding Dot, the American kestrel, small pieces of mouse on camera. “The kids get really jazzed and excited about seeing her eat on camera,” she says, with evident pleasure. The sessions cover the ecology of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, with the birds serving as a vivid, entirely unpredictable focal point that no slideshow could replicate.

The Practicalities of Scale

Running 30 virtual field trips a week requires more than willing educators. Denise, a retired art teacher who joined the team to handle scheduling, describes a booking system designed to make things easy for teachers: they visit the museum’s website, see what’s available, click to reserve a time, and receive an automated confirmation with a link. Behind the scenes, the bookings populate a shared departmental calendar that keeps the whole education team coordinated.

Alignment with curriculum standards is treated as essential rather than optional. All of the Centre’s virtual field trips map to US national standards — including the Next Generation Science Standards — so teachers can slot them directly into their teaching plans without the administrative friction that often discourages museum engagement. “Sometimes it’s a subject they’re not as comfortable teaching,” says Alex Martin, director of Interpretive Education, “so they’re able to use our virtual field trips as a way to get some of that content to their students during the time of the year that makes sense for them in their curriculum.”

The programme is funded through an anonymous donor and is described by Martin as affordable to run — “the primary costs are really just the people.” That simplicity matters: it’s a model that hasn’t required an elaborate technical infrastructure to sustain, and it has proven resilient. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed museums and schools simultaneously, the Buffalo Bill Center was already equipped. The programme didn’t pivot in a crisis — it simply accelerated.

A Model Worth Examining

What stands out about the Buffalo Bill Center’s approach is less the technology than the intentionality. Virtual field trips can easily become a pale substitute for the real thing — a screen-based simulacrum of presence that satisfies no one. What the Centre has built is something different: a programme with its own logic, its own strengths, and its own relationship with the students it reaches.

Digital educator George Miller, who has been with the programme since its first year, captures the spirit of it well. On days when snowstorms make the drive to the museum impossible, he brings props home and films from his living room. The landscape itself — the badlands, the Beartooth Mountains, the headwaters of half the rivers of the American West — becomes part of the lesson. “We use the outside of the museum as well as the inside of the museum to present these virtual field trips,” he says.

The result is something genuinely local offering itself to a genuinely global audience: a museum rooted in one specific place, using that rootedness as a gift to classrooms on the other side of the world.

George Miller is Digital and Outreach Educator at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Alex Martin is Director of Interpretive Education at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. They presented this work at the Museums & Schools Summit 2026.