The Children's Museum of Indianapolis

On February 25, the museum is launching (pun intended) a new experience called Curious Scientific Investigators: Flight Adventures. It’s not an exhibit, but more a series of experiences, programs, and a new multimedia show that teach children and families about flight. We’ve been thrilled to work with some great partners on this project including The Academy of Model Aeronautics that, believe or not, lives right down the road in Muncie, IN. When it comes to model aircraft, these are your guys and gals! This week’s guest blogger is Bill Pritchett from the AMA to tell you more about their organization and how they’re helping with this project.

By Bill Pritchett, Director of Education at the Academy of Model Aeronautics

Before planes and space shuttles, there was aeromodeling, or the making of model aircrafts to test ideas and principles of flight. All the way back in the 1800s the father of the Wright brothers gave them a rubber-powered model aircraft, and less than 100 years later man walked on the moon! Aeromodeling is a truly significant component of actual flight. Plus, it provides learning, excitement and, most importantly, fun for its many followers.

We’re not just talking about paper airplanes here! Aeromodeling includes everything from Free Flight (FF) models, such as Hand Launched Gliders or Catapult Launched Gliders (now that sounds cool!), and also includes any powered aircraft (rubber band, electric, or gas) and radio-controlled flight, and the AMA has activities for all of these! (Check out this video to see a professional remote control pilot and AMA member flying his plane at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis!)

AMA has been a proud participant in a significant NASA grant with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  CSI: Flight Adventures  has developed some amazing opportunities for kids to be introduced to aeromodeling, the educational aspects of model aviation, and having fun while they learn.  

This program promotes and supports aviation as an educational tool to educators and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) qualities of flight. Flight Adventures is just the beginning. The partnership between the museum, NASA and AMA also begins a collective journey to a more comprehensive understanding of building and flying all types of model aircraft for America’s youth.

If your kids are interested in getting started with the AMA, visit our website!

Matt Anderson, Children's Museum of Indianapolis actor, gives you a first hand account of how our extraordinary actors bring the museum experience to life for you and your family. This is the first in a series of posts from Matt. You might remember Matt from his exceptional Jelly Belly Art blog post last year!


In my bright blue outfit and neon green cape, guests instantly recognize me as a superhero.Of course, because Captain Extraordinary is unique to our museum, they don’t necessarily know which superhero I am. I often get: “Green Lantern!” or “Superman!” (or one time, inexplicably: “Wonder Woman!”). Either way, the kids are excited. We talk about dinosaurs and Transformers and how people can use porcupine quills to make art… but now it’s 10:30 am, and I must bid my friends farewell. I head to the dressing room and replace the outfit with an understated gray suit, a vest, and a tie. I whiten my temples and paint spirit gum on my lip to affix a mustache. Finally, I make my way to The Power of Children exhibition where, as Anne Frank’s father, I give a performance about the holocaust.

This is just my average day as an actor at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

For me, the fact that this is just an “average day” is precisely why I love the job so much. It’s a ridiculous understatement, but performing as Captain Extraordinary is rather different from performing as Otto Frank. And performing as Otto Frank is rather different from – well, whatever I’ll be performing next. Yet that’s exactly what makes the job so great: the incredible and almost staggering variety of programs we do here.

As much as I do love it, I had no idea growing up that this is what I’d be doing for a living. While I’d been interested in acting for much of my life—from making videos with friends in middle school to obtaining a theatre major in college—I never thought I’d be able to do anything with it for a career. Following graduation, I found work at the fantastical City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri and later at the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ve always enjoyed working with children and families so these jobs, though not traditionally in the theatre, felt well suited to me. It wasn’t until moving to Indianapolis in 2008 and seeing a listing for ACTOR on their children’s museum’s website that I realized that what I’d assumed were two entirely separate career tracks could actually merge.

My case is not an isolated one. There are nine full-time actors here at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and most have similar stories — a theatrical interest nurtured in high school, pursued into undergraduate studies, but with post-graduate jobs suddenly veering far from that path: brokerage assistant, coffee-shop barista, ballroom dance choreographer. Why weren’t we all actively pursuing careers in theatre, when it was clearly something we all loved?

Unfortunately, work in that discipline can have something of a stigma around it—being an actor means being either absurdly rich or famous in Hollywood, or a starving artist on the streets. It’s easy to see those extremes and not realize that there is a theatrical middle ground, such as in museums, especially if that type of specialized field is not yet in the public consciousness. Perhaps in the years to come, museum theatre will become a more mainstream profession. As it stands, my coming across this job may very well have been a fluke… and as such, I feel extremely lucky to have found it, and extremely lucky to once again be doing what I love.

To be continued...

As many of you know, we love to dress our dinos for special occasions. They've had witch hats for Halloween and Santa hats for the holidays. So of course when we learned Indianapolis would be hosting the Big Game in February, and thousands of football fans would be heading to the city, we started planning.

We decided to tie our dino's accessories into one of the Super Bowl Host Committee programs called Super Scarves. The goal of the Super Scarves initiative was to engage individuals who might not otherwise be able to participate in the Big Game. Volunteer knitters were asked to handcraft 8,000 scarves, enough for each of the volunteers to wear during the Big Game. They've far exceeded their goal. Volunteers from 43 states and three countries have knit more than 12,500 scarves. That's not including the five GIANT scarves they created for our alamosaurs breaking out of the museum and brachiosaurs peeking into the museum.

As you can imagine, creating our scarves wasn't an easy task. Two expert knitters, Karin Schmitt and Alison Jester from Broad Ripple Knits, were the masterminds behind our massive Super Scarves. They knitted five scarves in all—3 small and 2 large—so all five of our larger-than-life dinosaurs could look festive.

Instead of yarn, the women used rope...and lots of it! Each large scarf measures in at 20 inches wide and 30 feet long. Each small scarf is 2 feet wide and 20 feet long. In all, they used nearly 5,000 feet of rope! And of course regular knitting needles wouldn't do. The women used broomstick handles to knit the scarves. It took approximately 12 hours to complete the 5 scarves. Now that's a lot of knitting!

The mother dino, affectionately named Yvonne after her donor, is leading the charge already donning her special scarf. The museum wanted to honor museum Trustee Yvonne Shaheen, who was one of several knitters who helped create scarves for the Super Scarves program. Pretty soon the dinos will be getting other football-related accessories, too! We can't wait to show off the museum to all of the out of town visitors, and the dinos–scarves and all—will be right there at 30th and Illinois to greet them. If you're coming to Indianapolis to be part of the festivities and you're  looking for local activities for kids, be sure to add The Children's Museum of Indianapolis to your list!

One of the things that makes The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis the biggest and best in the world is its ability to extend learning beyond the walls of 3000 N. Meridian Street. In fact, every summer, museum staff and paleontologists escape the Dinosphere dome and travel all the way to the Badlands of South Dakota where they dig for real dinosaur bones! And the best part? You can do it too. That’s right, families, teachers and adults are all invited to register for single or multiple days of dino digging fun. And yes, we find stuff. Lots of stuff.

For example…

Last summer we found over 200 65 million year old specimen including Nano-tyranous teeth, femora from school bus sized Edmontosaurus annectens (aka Duckbill Dinosaur), ribs, mandible pieces and so much more! 

Check out This Week’s WOW to see what a day at the dig site looks like and learn the answer to the question Just what happens to all those fossils once they’ve been discovered and can I use mine as a paper weight?

To learn more or to register for this summer’s dig, click here.

Ever wonder how the world’s biggest and best children’s museum creates such extraordinary exhibits and programs that are as compelling for adults as for children? Well, the museum uses a host of criteria we call “Criteria for An Extraordinary Family Learning Experience.”  These include:

• Rich content across the arts, sciences and humanities
• Relevant
• Inter-generationally appealing
• Audience appropriate
• Developmentally appropriate
• Entertaining, fun, and safe
• Unique
• Collection/object-connected
• Compelling
• Fundable
• Production/operations friendly
• Linked to other media/content creators and providers

At the museum, ideas for exhibits and programs can come from anywhere, and frequently do! Our best exhibits typically involve a team comprised of an exhibit developer, exhibit designer, family learning and interpretation expert, collections curator, marketer, operations expert, etc.  For the museum’s larger permanent exhibits, the process from idea to funding to production and opening can take five years.  For our international traveling and temporary exhibits, the museum can create and produce these exhibits in 1 to 2 years. 

What ideas do YOU have for permanent or temporary exhibits at the museum?

• Bumblebee (yep, the Transformer) is “dressed” for the holiday and ready to toss a giant snowball your way
• A huge giant snow globe that you can activate to “snow” inside
• Indoor ice skating
• Ice fishing indoors
• Everyone’s favorite—giant indoor snow slide

Plus, photo ops with Santa and some very big holiday objects from our collection—like a huge Cuckoo Clock. If you're looking for indoor activities in Indianapolis this holiday, we are the place.
 
We’re always open to new ideas for the holidays. Post a comment and let us know how else we might bring the holidays to you and your family.
 
Happy Holidays!

As you probably already know, our Jolly Days exhibit goes into the same gallery where the Children’s Museum Guild Haunted House is during the month of October.  It takes our hardworking Facilities staff plus our amazing Guild Witches 2 months to build and decorate the Haunted House—and it all has to come out of there in a week!  Starting November 1, it’s a scramble to get the Haunted House pulled down and packed away, and the gallery cleaned and re-painted so that Jolly Days can start going in.  So while that’s going on in the gallery space, our exhibits and production team are working hard to get all the decorations in our welcome center and Sunburst Atrium into place. 

The giant tree in the Welcome Center requires a crane to put it in place and decorate it, so we usually do that on the first closed Monday after Halloween so we don’t have to worry about visitors’ safety.  Then it’s about 4 straight days of work to get all the other decorations out of our storage facility, into the building, and arranged on the deck around the tree.  We also have a new resident in our welcome center—the Transformer, Bumblebee!—and he has to be moved several times to allow us to get equipment around the welcome center and hang all the snowflakes  from our ceiling.  Once we’re done with the Welcome Center, the crew moves to start unpacking the rest of Jolly Days!

The Yule Slide—everyone’s favorite holiday tradition here at the museum—takes a crew of four people a day and a half to install and decorate.  The tree in the Atrium has to be assembled and decorated before our collections department staff can put Jingles and his stuffed animal friends into place; they are real artifacts from our Steiff animal collection, and have to be handled with care! The gallery façade (the house, the lights, and the title graphic) takes another day to put up.  Meanwhile, inside the gallery, our paint crew finishes re-painting and touching up so that the exhibit can be unpacked, installed, cleaned, and tested—4 full semi trailers worth of stuff! 

When the walls are in place, the curator brings in the toys and games from our collection that make Jolly Days special—from old board games to stuffed bunnies, even Santa’s antique desk!  The graphics staff adds trees to the walls and snowflakes to our theater, replacing any of our signs that are damaged or dirty, and our cleaning crew washes and sanitizes all the toys from the play areas. Once the lights are focused and the floors swept, the exhibit is finally ready for you to visit! 

So from start to finish, getting Jolly Days ready to open the day after Thanksgiving takes us about 2700 work hours total!  I’m tired just thinking about it… or it might have something to do with the fact that I’ve still got work to do….

Jolly Days is open now through Jan. 8, 2012. It's a great INDOOR winter activity for kids and families in Indianapolis!