Are your children fascinated by the world of construction? Do they know more about backhoe loaders, wreckers, piledrivers, and bulldozers than you do? Probably! Kids love to watch demolition and construction, and with that in mind, we wondered what sort of equipment will be coming into our Museum for our renovation in early August.
Our Manager of Exhibits, Rachel Towns, reached out to DPR Hardin Construction, who will be bringing in the big tools, and learned what they plan to use in order to transform our current space into the NEW Children’s Museum of Atlanta.
For all the high work, including installing new lighting and working on our new mezzanine, Step Up to Science, the crew will have a pair of scissor lifts. This is a mechanized access platform, a portable, hydraulic-powered lift that can be raised into the air directly above the base.
They’ll also be bringing a mini-excavator to tear down certain items and help load debris. These are fairly common in the construction industry. It is a fairly small machine with a backfill blade, and moves on treads.
To remove parts of the flooring and install the mezzanine area, the crew will also have a skid steer. The workers doing this part of the job will be using hydraulic powered concrete saws and chipping hammers for concrete demolition. A skid steer is often known by the brand name “Bobcat,” although quite a few different companies make these vehicles. It’s kind of like the way, for years, everybody called every brand of photocopier a “Xerox machine”!
We’re sorry that, for safety reasons, your children won’t be able to see these machinery in operation. On the other hand, if they’re a little blue because they won’t be able to play in the Museum for a few months, perhaps you can share this post with them, break out the toy construction equipment and blocks and make believe with them that you’re building your own children’s museum! Then join us in late 2015 to see what our new space looks like!
On January 19th 2006, a rocket lifted the New Horizons probe from the surface of the Earth, never again to return. At the time of this writing, the early afternoon of July 14th 2015, the probe has completed its flyby of Pluto. For some NASA scientists, today is the most important day out of the three-thousand, four-hundred and sixty-three that have passed since launch. Those few thousand days include others with their own special importance, however. Through my office door I can hear the low, joyful roar of children playing here at the museum. Save for a handful of older kids, each of those girls and boys marks one of those days since January 19th of 2006 as their birthday. For their whole lives, this piano-sized, plutonium-powered robot has been speeding through empty space at velocity of over nine miles per second away from the sun. And they are all still going strong, on paths unknown.
I was born in the year 1985 in Huntsville, Alabama. As a child, I made regular visits to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center located there; space exploration fascinated me then as it does now. My interest in rockets and astronauts dominated the design choices of my childhood bedroom, which featured a hanging mobile of the solar system. Pluto, then included as a planet (but what’s in a name?), was represented as a grey, mostly formless rock. That was our best guess at the time as to what it would look like. We now know, though just for the past few weeks have we known, that to have been an error. Pluto, as it turns out, is a ruddy world with varied geographic features. Certainly the original guess could have ended up being accurate, but as it stands this serves as a perfect example of my belief that inquiry and exploration are practices that enrich our world. Learning and understanding are value-adding courses of action. Pluto is a real place and, standing beneath it in the night sky, the only thing between it and you is the distance and a few miles of air. We now know what it looks like. We didn’t before.
The kids I work with on a daily basis as the science educator of this museum are in the business of exploring the universe around them. They are aligned in this sense with the grownups of the world who have gotten jobs as scientists, and certainly some of the voices I hear even now outside my door will one day deliver presentations at important academic conferences or discuss the design of an experiment late into the evening with researcher peers. Regardless of job title, however, it is my personal and professional goal that visitors to our museum, young and old alike, gain some kind of new appreciation for this world and those around us. Science is one of the tools that I have to assist with that, and a wonderful thing about using science is the fact that it can show us how interconnected everything truly is. The gravity on Pluto is not as strong as Earth’s, but it follows the same rules as the gravity on Earth. Understanding how the radio waves we use to send commands and hear from New Horizons work also leads to an understanding of the light that we use to see. The same rules of color-mixing that the probe uses in order to take photographs is taking place with paint and brushes right now a few yards from my office. No matter your starting point, seeking to understand the universe can take you to unexpected places. All roads lead to everywhere.
In just a few short weeks we will temporarily close our doors to undergo a renovation. Upon reopening, there will be a dedicated science area that we are calling Step Up to Science. Another new addition to the museum will be our climbing globe, 14 feet in diameter. If we were to create a scale model of the solar system based upon that as our Earth, the moon would be about 3 feet, 10 inches across and located, on average, 422 feet away. The sun would be 1,530 feet across and a bit over 31 miles away. Pluto, for its part, would be 2 feet, 7 inches across and almost 1000 miles away from our front door. And New Horizons itself would be an invisible mote of dust drifting by, only ever having gotten as close as 14 feet to Pluto’s surface in our scale model, taking five seconds to move an inch. One day in the not-so-distant future, kids sitting at our Science Bar will draw up maps of our scale model solar system. Or they will program a robot. Or they will toddle right past me and to the lunch tables, still waiting for the day or the question or the experiment that piques their interest. We will be here, just as Pluto is there. I look forward to the adventure!
Hello everyone! Professor Labcoat here. It’s National Maker Week, and today I’d like to show you how to learn about electrical circuits using play dough!
We use electricity to power all kinds of things every day. Electricity is what we call it when charged particles are pushed around, and we can make, or “generate”, electricity in many different ways. The power plants that generate electricity for entire cities use huge magnets to push electricity through the big wires that we see along the side of the road, solar panels use light energy from the sun to push electricity around, and batteries use chemical reactions.
The materials needed for this experiment are 4 AA batteries, a light emitting diode (LED), and some play dough that’s made with salt. There are many recipes online for play dough; I made some by combining 2 cups of flour and ½ cup of salt with roughly 1 cup of water added slowly. Food coloring can make for a fun color addition. You can also add a couple of teaspoons of oil and a teaspoon of cream of tartar to help with the texture, or just use some of the store bought variety!
Finding a light emitting diode (LED) might be a little tricky. I took apart a small finger-mounted flashlight to get mine. These parts are also available at many electronics stores or online for less than a dollar apiece.
The first thing we need for our circuit is something to generate the electricity. The chemical reactions inside the batteries will do this for us by pushing charged particles from one side of the battery to the other. We want all the push to go in the same direction, so we need to line up our batteries end-to-end and pointing in the same way. A little ball of dough acts as a conductor between our batteries. We need these batteries to push the electricity hard enough to make our LED light up. We measure the push of electricity in units called “volts”. Each battery gives 1.5 volts worth of push to the electricity, so four in a row give 6 volts of push total. This should be strong enough to move electricity through both the dough and the LED.
The play dough is our conductor. Instead of electrons moving through metal, our electricity will take the form of tiny pieces of the salt (called “ions”) moving through the water in the dough. It takes more energy to move ions through dough than to move electrons through metal, so dough wouldn’t make a very good extension cord. It is safe to use with the batteries, however, because it won’t heat up as a metal wire would. Plus, it’s fun to squish!
Electricity can only move through LEDs in one direction, so you might need to switch yours around a little bit before it works. Once you’ve got a circuit together, you can try out different things! What happens if your dough rolls are fat and short? Skinny and long? Does it change the brightness of your bulb?
There are many people who have created many great lessons to go along with this kind of circuitry. Check out the wonderful work of the University of St. Thomas and their “Squishy Circuit” homepage!
I hope you enjoy making your play dough circuit and learning about electricity! There are many wonderful things that we can use science to build and understand, and Makers the world over have created many fantastic resources for Young Makers!
Earlier this week, in The New York Times, David Kohn wrote about children and learning, and although he didn’t use the exact phrase that we do here, “The power of play,” it still resonates throughout his story. Children learn through hands-on exploration. They need to set their own pace, and they need to be given constant opportunities to use their imagination, create rules and boundaries, and interact with other children.
From Kohn’s story, “Play is often perceived as immature behavior that doesn’t achieve anything,” says David Whitebread, a psychologist at Cambridge University who has studied the topic for decades. “But it’s essential to their development. They need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions. Kids learn these things through playing.” You can’t teach these things, and you certainly can’t test them. Children will observe and respond and learn at different levels, but even the silliest-looking play has so much more going on than can be quantified, objectified, and compartmentalized.
Kristin Tillotson, writing in The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, uses an analogy familiar to anybody who’s read the Sunday funnies: when kids explore, it looks like one of the characters in Bil Keane’s The Family Circus, taking off on their meandering, “serpentine” paths, connecting points A and B by way of every other possible letter. We see this a lot with our regular guests. Sometimes, they arrive and the child has a very specific idea about which area of our Museum they’d like to explore and go straight there, but just as often, we’ll see a child absolutely determined to climb in our treehouse, but only after winding around through every other place they can find and writing their name on our paint wall first.
It’s pretty amusing watching children do this, but it’s also perfectly natural behavior. Tillotson calls this “informal meandering” an organic way to learn, and Marjorie Bequette, director of evaluation and research at the Science Museum of Minnesota, agrees, pointing out that children respond to being in charge of the adventure.
Even looking around and observing things in a space, whether it’s one you are familiar with or one that’s brand new, has so much value. In her story, Tillotson mentions that some New York police officers receive training in observation at the Museum of Modern Art. I read some more about that in a 2009 story at Smithsonian, and learned that there is a program where veteran officers get an early morning class in observation. It’s evidence for Tillotson’s theory that museums really are mind-expanding, and that, whether you’re an adult or a child, the experience at any museum is one where the observer is continually learning.
When you next visit us, once you catch up with your child after their “serpentine” tour of the place, try spending a few minutes asking questions about what they have explored and observed. What does the Moon Sand feel like? How many lights do they see? What do they notice about colors and shapes? Perhaps they’ll have some questions about what you have seen and explored as well, so keep your eyes and ears open as you play with your children… you may just learn a thing or two yourself!
In my last blog post, I said, “No matter what you’re interested in or what question you have, there’s probably a scientist somewhere trying to figure it out.” That’s very true, because science is a way to learn about the world around us and everything that’s in it. There are all different kinds of scientists who are interested in all different kinds of things! You can learn more about almost anything that you’re interested in by using science.
The other day, my friend Cayce got to go to Six Flags Over Georgia to try out their Batman: The Ride roller coaster…backwards! She had a lot of fun, and even got a video of her on the ride! I decided that it’d be fun to use her video to talk about the science we can learn from roller coasters.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t a big fan of roller coasters, but I like them more and more these days. Roller coasters do some pretty cool things. They can go very fast, turn upside down, and make you dizzy very quickly. It seems pretty complicated at first, but science can help us to understand complicated things!
To figure out roller coasters, we need to think about things called “forces”. A force is a push or pull on something, and this can happen in a lot of different ways. When something pushes or pulls on something else, we say it’s “applying a force”. For example, if you push someone on a swing, you are applying a pushing force to them. If the wind blows your hair around, that’s a force the wind is applying to your hair. And you’re stuck to the ground because the earth’s gravity is applying a force pulling you downward!
Some kind of force is needed to make something start to move, slow down, or change direction. We might not always realize this is what’s going on, however, because forces can show up in places that we don’t always expect.
For example, if you throw a beanbag, you push on it with your hand to apply the force to get it to start moving. Once the beanbag leaves your hand, it’s not getting any more force from you. There are still forces on the beanbag, though, and these forces work against the force of your throw! One force is a push back from the air the beanbag is moving through. This slows the beanbag down a little bit. Another force is the force of gravity. This pulls the beanbag towards the ground. Finally, when the beanbag hits the ground, the ground applies a force that stops it from moving!
This all seems very normal to us because we deal with these kinds of forces in our everyday lives. It took scientists a long time to figure out all of these forces are happening, because everybody was so used to them! But, if you were an astronaut in space far away from the earth with no air around you, no ground under you, and no gravity to speak of, and you threw a beanbag, it would keep going in a straight line for thousands of years! It wouldn’t have any other forces around to change how it moved.
So, what does this have to do with roller coasters?
A person riding a roller coaster, such as my friend Cayce, moves in a lot of different directions at different speeds. All these changes in speed and direction mean that there are a lot of forces changing the way the person is moving. When we ride a roller coaster, we feel these forces as pushes and pulls from the straps on our seats.
One of the most important forces for roller coasters to work the way they do is the force of gravity. Just like our beanbag example, where the force from your hand gives the beanbag the push to get it started, gravity provides the force that moves you around on a roller coaster. You see, there are no motors or engines on roller coaster cars. What happens at the start of almost every roller coaster is the ride pulls you up a tall hill, and then pushes you off the edge. You can see this in Cayce’s video: at the beginning, she and her sister slowly move up a hill. The moment they start moving after that, the only force that’s making them move faster is the force of gravity pulling them down!
The first hill of a roller coaster is always the tallest part of a roller coaster, because after gravity starts to pull you around, it won’t be able to make you move to a taller place than where you started. In much the same way, if you drop a bouncy ball (without throwing it at the ground!), it will never bounce higher than where you dropped it.
Roller coasters are designed to make sure that the forces they apply to the riders aren’t enough to hurt them; this is a big part of the reason why you have to be a certain height to ride roller coasters! The seats are designed to make sure that they push and pull on the right parts of people. When roller coasters go upside down, the forces applied to the riders make sure that gravity can’t pull them out of their seats. And, sometimes on roller coasters, as the forces are changing around, you don’t feel any forces at all! This is called feeling “zero-g”. The “g” stands for “gravity”, and this means that you feel weightless. A feeling of weightlessness is what astronauts in the International Space Station experience! It’s only during special occasions that we get to have that sensation on the earth, which is one of the reasons roller coasters and other fun amusement park rides are so exciting!
I hope you enjoyed learning about roller coasters with me, and I look forward to talking about all sorts of other things with you in this space. Take care!
Hello girls and boys, parents and friends! Professor Labcoat here!
I work at The Children’s Museum of Atlanta as the Science Educator. This means that I get to do all kinds of activities here at the museum as well as in classrooms all across Atlanta and the surrounding area! Whether I’m mixing up a chemical reaction to make foamy bubbles, making my hair stand on end with static electricity, or using invisible ink to show how germs move around, I’m always having fun!
Science is all about trying to figure out how stuff works, from the tiniest pieces of the tiniest speck to the biggest things we can see out in space – as well as everything in-between, including you and me. No matter what you’re interested in or what question you have, there’s probably a scientist somewhere trying to figure it out. And the best part is that, one day, that scientist could be you!
You see, all scientists get their start the same way everyone gets their start: as a kid. I, Professor Labcoat, am no exception. I was a kid who wanted to be all sorts of things when I was growing up. At different times I wanted to be a garbage man, a puppeteer, a veterinarian, an actor, a doctor, a teacher, a scientist, and an architect. It was tricky to choose, but after I finished high school, I decided to go to college at Georgia Tech and study something called Materials Science and Engineering, or MSE for short. People who study MSE learn all about different kinds of metals and plastics and other stuff that things like cars, spaceships, sandwich bags, and comfy chairs are made of. They learn how to make things, measure things, and sometimes even how to break things! I enjoyed figuring things out and working in a laboratory, but as it turns out, my favorite thing to do is to share what I’ve learned with other people and show everyone around me what a cool world we live in.
One of the coolest things about the world is the fact that I know a lot of wonderful people who are working to make the world a better place. These are my Superhero Scientist friends, and I’d like to eventually introduce you to all of them! For this special first blog post of mine, however, I’m going to start with my friend Kathy Silver.
When I was in college learning how to be a scientist, Kathy was in some of my classes with me. She’d started working in the laboratory before I did, and when I came along, she helped to teach me how the different tools and machines worked. Even grownups don’t know everything, and we all have to help each other figure stuff out sometimes. Nowadays, Kathy works at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, or GTRI for short. There, she works with other scientists to try and solve all kinds of problems, and figure all kinds of things out. I decided to pay my friend a visit, so I went down the street to Georgia Tech to visit Kathy and see the buildings where she works. I decided to ask her some questions so that you could learn about her and her job. Girls and boys, allow me to introduce: My friend Kathy Silver, a Superhero Scientist!
Prof. Labcoat: How old were you when you decided you wanted to be a scientist?
Kathy Silver: Probably about 10 or 11.
PL: Was there anything else you wanted to be growing up?
KS: A medical doctor.
PL: I thought about doing that too! What is your favorite thing about your job now?
KS: Learning about new things happening on our campus that help others. For example, some researchers are looking at less painful methods to deliver vaccines/medicines traditionally delivered via shots. No more painful shots at the doctor’s office!
PL: I’m sure a lot of my friends would like that! But sometimes things that are no fun are necessary. What is the hardest part of your job?
KS: Deciding when an experiment is not working as expected and knowing when it’s time to move on to another approach
PL: That can certainly be tricky. I once spent six months trying to make one measurement, and after all of that time it didn’t work and I had to start all over! I eventually figured it out, though. What are you working on right now?
KS: Some of the work we are doing in our lab includes materials analysis (determining how and why something broke, for example), lithography (a method of printing) on very small objects (called micro-lithography) and viewing objects at the atomic level with special microscopes.
PL: That sounds cool! What kinds of special tools do you use?
KS: Liquid nitrogen (temperature of about -320 F, more than twice the coldest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica) , optical and atomic microscopes, and lasers.
PL: Wow. That all sounds really interesting! Is there anything you’d like to tell my friends who might want to have a job like yours?
KS: Do well in school, do math and science homework (don’t get discouraged when it seems too difficult – seek out help from your teacher), read for fun and most importantly, be curious. Curiosity is not only the first step in the scientific process, it is also a scientist’s best trick for keeping their work fun and rewarding!
PL: That’s some great advice! Thank you so much, Kathy!
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I’m so happy that I got to introduce you to my very first Superhero Scientist friend. Keep checking the blog to hear more from me and I promise to show you some cool stuff, answer your questions, and introduce you to even more Superhero Scientists!
One of the many things adults assume about pre-school age children is that they are too “young” to do science. And if you see science as mysterious green solutions fizzing in tubes and occasionally going “bloop!” or worse, “BOOM!!” that is probably true. But what child development and science education experts know is that young children are natural scientists. For them, nothing in the world is a given. They test and experiment with everything. As an example, an adult knows that if you let go of the ball, it drops to the ground and you have to pick it up – gravity is pulling it there. For a one or two year old – there is always the exciting possibility that this one time, if you let go of the ball – it will go up! So they drop it again and again (waiting for their grown up to hand it back to them) to see what happens. Young children experiment every day like that.
So as adults, how can we help support our young children’s science learning? The National Science Teachers Association has come up with key principles to support this early science learning – and we’ve listed some of them below:
Adults play a central and important role in helping young children learn science.
Children (and adults) have more fun when they learn together and when the adult creates an environment that is open to science learning – which may include making fun messes.
Young children need multiple and varied opportunities to engage in science exploration and discovery.
There are lots of fun ways to do science exploration with young children, everything from going to the park and seeing how many different types of bugs you can find, to visiting the Children’s Museum and seeing if the child can engage in some of the basic science steps: designing an experiment (Can I make the orange ball go to the water play in the ball machine?) to testing different paths (If I put it in the giant corkscrew, where does it end up?) to learning the results (I made it go to the water pool!).
Young children develop science skills and knowledge in both formal and informal settings.
In other words – science happens everywhere! At home, in the community, and in the classroom.
Young children develop science skills and knowledge over time.
To effectively build science understandings, like having your child learn about light and energy, takes place over many days or weeks of discussion and having fun with everything from learning about shadows, to using a prism to make a rainbow.
Young Children develop science skills and learning by engaging in experiential learning.
Hands-on, real life learning resonates with pre-school children. They are not abstract thinkers yet, so they like concrete examples that reflect their daily lives.
As a parent, one of my handicaps with teaching my young children science was my own fear that I didn’t know enough! If my child asked me “How does gravity work?” I would quickly make up an answer having to do with the earth’s huge mass and how that mass pulls lighter things (objects with less mass) and holds them down. Then the scary next question “what is mass?” at which point I was out of my depth and quickly changed the subject (Okay, not the ideal parenting technique!). Now, what I would do is say “I don’t know, let’s have fun finding out together” and use some of the great resources available to parents and adult caregivers. I’ve listed some websites below that we use here at the Children’s Museum to help.
The Children’s Museum has lots of opportunities for our young learners to engage with science, from our exhibits to fabulous programs like Exploration Station and Dr. Science Workshops. Please join us and have fun with science!
As our community outreach programs have grown over the years, our Imaginators have performed mini-musicals in schools throughout Atlanta. Since the mini-musicals are geared toward the concept behind the exhibit, rather than the details of the exhibit itself, they are perfect to use in the Connected Learning: Connected Communities outreach, which we shared with you at the beginning of the summer. Now, we’re expanding our existing “Imaginators On the Go!” program to make it bigger, faster, stronger.
Designed for students in pre-K through 5th grade, “Imaginators on the Go!” offers a program with a dynamic and interactive theatre production, as well as special interactive classroom workshops that bring the learning to life. The performances and the workshops are certified for meeting both Georgia performance standards as well as STEM guidelines.
The musicals and shows include “Storm’s a-Brewin'” for pre-K through 3rd grade (weather science), “Detective Readmore and the Word Bandit,” for pre-K through 1st grade (phonics, word placement, and spelling), “Georgia Grown,” for pre-K through 3rd grade (life science, plants and trees), and “Muskogee,” for pre-K through 5th grade (social studies, Native Americans).
The in-school experience of a mini-musical is not a great deal unlike what guests see here at the Museum, with perhaps one or two amusing adaptations to the different setting. But the result is certainly the same: in “Storm’s a-Brewin’,” it’s a crowd of cheering, clapping children learning what causes the sound of thunder, joining forces to blow the selfish Mr. Storm out of the room, and answering questions about weather safety. The kids love the break from the classroom routine, and while they leave pleased with the music and the Imaginators’ funny performance, they also leave having learned one or two things.
That’s why the program is important. It teaches kids through interactive give-and-take, songs, and a very fun story while reinforcing curriculum. “Storm’s a-Brewin’,” and all of the mini-musicals, are written to entertain, educate, and engage the children, and they’re all hugely successful in doing that.
We’re also sending out Imaginator Scentists to classrooms this fall with Science on the Go!, and four workshop programs: “Gloopy Glop,” which spotlights chemical reactions, “Team Body,” which spotlights body systems and healthy eating, “Head in the Clouds,” for weather science, and “Germs!,” which is fairly self-explanatory. No actual germs will be used in these demos, and we promise not to create explosions in your classroom.
After the show is finished, the teachers can use the concepts that are introduced to enhance the classroom experience. For example, in between some of the songs, one Imaginator may engage the students with some very quick questions and answers about their own experiences with weather – how to dress in the rain, for instance – while waiting for his fellow actor to return from a lightning-fast costume change. These questions can be repeated in the class, with reminders about how the actors explained things.
Doesn’t this sound like too much fun for one school day? If you are interested in having “Imaginators on the Go!” at your school or community center, please visit our website for more information, or phone us at 404.527.5967.
Visitors to the Museum this month will learn about three masters of art while creating their own masterpieces, all the while becoming Box Masters. The works of Josef Albers, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louise Nevelson will be used to teach color, structure, and sculpture, inspiring the creation of crafts, science, and architecture, with boxes!
“Homage to the Square: Apparition”, 1959. Josef Albers
Falling Water; built in 1964; designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
“Untitled” 1964. Louise Nevelson
German-born artist Josef “The Square Man” Albers created over 1,000 paintings, drawings, and prints of squares between the 1950’s and 1970’s. While some may look at these works of art and just see squares, there is both mathematics and color theory (such as the effects that colors have on one another) behind each piece. The series Homage to the Square explores what happens when different sizes and colors of squares are placed upon one another and how they create optical illusions. His experimentation inspired artists and movements, such as Geometric Abstraction, Color Field, and Op Art. In the Craft Maker Space, your little artists will channel Albers by doing a sugar cube project.
Frank Lloyd Wright, named the greatest American architect by the American Institute of Architects, started out as a draftsman in the 1880’s. Inspired by the flatness of the prairie, he created an American style of architecture which became known as the Prairie Style. This style is known for its one-floor horizontals, with rows of windows that strengthen the horizontal theme. Wright is another prolific artist who in seventy years drew over 1000 designs, half of which were actually constructed. He became a major influence on the architects that have come after him. In the Craft Maker Space, a model making project will be done to show the principles of Wright’s Prairie Style.
Russian sculptor Louise Nevelson came to America as a child in 1905. She considered herself the first recycler because she used discarded wooden objects to create her works of art. Her use of individual pieces to create one monumental sculpture is known as assemblage or “a work of art made by grouping found or unrelated objects”. Nevelson paved the way for female artists, who were not previously known to make large, sculptural pieces of art. In the Box Lab, your little sculptors and architects will be led by the Imaginators in constructing structures inspired by Wright’s buildings and sculptures encouraged by the works of Nevelson.
Don’t think we forgot about your little scientists! In the Science Maker Space, arches and triangles will be explored to see how they can strengthen bridges and buildings. Binoculars will be made using colorful gels that will show what happens when colors mix. The Lab Coat Kids Science Show will focus on light and color, by teaching your curious kids about prisms, while also learning how primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) become secondary colors (green, purple, and orange).
Who knew that boxes could inspire so many artists and works of art? We hope that everyone gets creative this month and uses what they’ve learned about boxes to make some masterpieces!
According to my research, the answer is no. By simply Google-ing ‘kid inventor’, I have discovered examples of inventions created by children that have completely opened my eyes to the importance of childhood imagination. My Google results have told me that children are innovative and capable of just about anything. At a young age, their minds are open and creative, not yet crushed and suppressed by the practical, adult world. And many people simply forget the brilliancy that lies within a child’s mind.
Just to point out a few mildly important examples in history, Braille was invented by Louis Braille in 1829 at just 15 years old. As a child, he was injured and went blind at the age of three. This inspired him to create a language of letters, numbers, and symbols by using raised bumps. The concept has been applied internationally in almost every language. Another amazing invention, that most of us use daily, was the first television and digital picture. Philo Farnsworth was also only 15 years old when he created the first sketches of a television in 1921. By the time he turned 21, he had created the first digital image on one of his televisions. And finally, the familiar name in every history textbook, Alexander Graham Bell. Most people know him for inventing the telephone, but little do people know that he was hard at work even as a child. At age 12, he invented a wheat de-husking machine for mills in the food business. These children changed the world in a serious way with their inventions.
But there were other inventions that were also just as impactful, but maybe not so serious. Everyone’s favorite summer treat, and a booming business seen in and around Atlanta, was invented by an 11 year old. The Popsicle was accidentally created by Frank Epperson in 1905 when he left his drink made with fruity Kool-Aid powder and water outside over night with the stirring stick still in the cup. The next morning, he found his drink frozen and still delicious. He began selling them a few years later calling them “epsicles”. Another favorite, and very popular toy, was also a kid invention. The trampoline was invented by George Nissen at 16 to help with his gymnastics and diving skills. Now, it is a toy that everyone enjoys bouncing around on! And lastly, this final fun example applies to kids and adults looking to warm their ears in the bitter cold winters. Chester Greenwood of Maine is famously known for inventing the ear muffs in 1874 at age 15 to protect and warm his ears in the cold Maine winters. His scarf was too bulky and itchy to fit around his head, so he designed the ear muff and had his grandmother sew the creation together. Now thanks to Chester, even those in the south sport the fluffy and warm garment in the winters.
These examples are all major and impactful inventions from American history and created by kids! But, the suggestion to parents is not necessarily to expect a child to create a history-altering invention; the purpose is to encourage kids to utilize their creativity and their innovation. An article on psychologytoday.com writes about the importance of exposing kids to arts as it leads to greater innovation as an adult. The article discusses a study that was conducted at Michigan State University saying that “childhood participation in arts and crafts leads to innovation, patents, and increases the odds of starting a business as an adult.” (The full article is listed here for a great read!). So, put no limits on what kids can create with their imaginations. Allow them to “think outside the box”. The theme of the Children’s Museum of Atlanta’s exhibit is just that, ‘Outside the Box’. The space is supplied with as many boxes and creative pieces a child could need to create whatever their mind designs. So are you smarter than your kid inventor? I’m not so sure, but come find out and invent with your kids at the Children’s Museum of Atlanta’s ‘Outside the Box’.
Growing Into the World 