Children's Museum Marketing

Today is the first day of spring and the Vernal Equinox! An old myth claims you can stand an egg on its end ONLY during the Vernal Equinox, when day and night are equal in length. Supposedly, this is because there is equal gravity between the Earth and the sun on that day. But that's a myth! In reality, you can stand an egg on end any day. Why?

On the bottom of an egg you will find tiny bumps in the shell. Those bumps are simply irregularities in the eggshell that hold the egg up (similar to legs).

To prove this point, we successfully balanced an egg outside of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis yesterday– a full day before the Vernal Equinox.

Also, while we were having fun with eggs, we tested out the strength of an egg. Because of the shape of an egg, it can hold up to five pounds of weight on top without breaking! Don't believe me? Check out this photo!

This is a fun science experiement you can try at home, too! You’ll need:
* 2 caps from 2-liter bottles of pop
* 1 egg
* hardback books

1. Place one bottle cap open-side up on a smooth, level surface.
2. Put the large end of the egg on the bottle cap.
3. Put the other cap, open-side down, on the egg.
4. Gradually add some books or other weighty materials.
 

More egg trivia:
* Spin an egg to see if it’s hard-cooked or raw. If it wobbles, it’s raw!
* The expression, “It’s so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk,” could only be true if the sidewalk reached a temperature of 300°F.
* Eggs have tiny pores just like human skin. Through these pores they can absorb flavors and odors, so it’s best to store eggs in a carton in a refrigerator.
* Eggs age more in one day at room temperature than in one week in the refrigerator.
* If you accidentally drop an egg on the floor, sprinkle it with a lot of salt before you clean it up. This makes clean-up easier.

All over the world eggs symbolize the release of earth from winter and the coming of new life in the spring. We hope you enjoy the first day of spring!

Spring is quickly approaching (can you believe the warm weather this week?!), and here at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, spring means Spring Break! This Spring Break we're especially excited about the LEGO® Travel Adventure exhibit that just opened.  The exhibit invites you to use one of the greatest building materials of all time—LEGO® bricks—as a vehicle for imagination. Where do you need to go? What does your vehicle need to do? You're not just along for the ride! You imagine the journey and the destination, and build your dream machine!

In This Week's WOW, Josh, Claire, and a special guest Nicole take part in a cool LEGO® challenge similar to what families will get to do at our LEGO® Late Night event on March 31. You pick the destination, determine what terrain you'll have to cross to get there, then build a vechicle to take you.

If you want to participate in a challenge like the one here, be sure to sign your family up for Spring Break LEGO® Late Night on March 31. If you're visiting from out of town this Spring Break, check out our hotel packages and get the most out of your family trip to Indianapolis.

LEGO® Travel Adventure is at the museum through July 22, 2012. Be sure to see it before it leaves!

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!

Who’s the new doll at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis?  It’s Barbie® I Can Be™…Architect!

Right by the shoe chandelier in Barbie: The Fashion Experience are two display cases filled with some pretty special design materials. Thanks to the folks at Mattel, we borrowed the original, one-of-a-kind prototype Barbie® I Can Be™… Architect doll in her bright pink and blue dress, black jacket, and shiny ankle boots. Mattel designers created the doll to plan every detail—from face paint to dress fabric.

Mattel also sent us designer Amy Lee’s inspiration board, first sketches, and the final design drawing for the doll.  Even the tiny prototypes for Barbie® doll’s must-have accessories – hard hat, Dream House® scale model, and blueprints—showed up on site, straight from the archives!

Barbie® I Can Be™…Architect is the newest doll in the I Can Be™…career series.  She hopes to inspire young girls to consider architecture as a career in the traditionally male-dominated field. Two female members of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) advised Mattel about the doll’s clothes and accessories.  They wanted Barbie® to be recognizable as an architect and to challenge us how we think about architects.  “Who said architects can’t wear pink?” 

Watch a short video about Barbie® I Can Be™ Architect and her official debut at the AIA (American Institute of Architects) convention.

Be sure to stop by Barbie®: The Fashion Experience  on your summer vacation to get a “behind-the-seams” look at the new Barbie® doll.  This doll is ready to draw!

©2011 Mattel. All Rights Reserved.

Today we have a special guest blogger, Eileen Ogintz. She is a nationally syndicated travel columnist and a leading family travel expert. We're very excited to have a special Children's Museum post from Eileen! Visit TakingtheKids for more travel tips.  

By Eileen Ogintz

One minute and 45 seconds.

That’s all the time museum officials say they’ve got at an exhibit to capture young kids’ interest and attention.

Of course the more the adults with themare engaged and involved, the longer kids will spend on an exhibit and the more they’ll remember.

That’s why exhibits here at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis are designed for adults and kids to explore together. Did you know this is only one of three children’s museums in the country that collects artifacts—over 120,000, in fact, some on loan from other museums around the world.  Before you come, take a virtual tour with the kids and decide what you want to see. (Make sure each child gets a pick. If you’ve got more than one adult in the group and kid with different interests, divide up when you arrive.)

Take time to look with the kids at some of the collections—whether it’s Ryan White’s room in the Power of Children or original Barbie dolls or Captain Kidd’s cannon—the only pirate cannon ever retrieved from a shipwreck in the Caribbean—in the new Treasures of the Earth exhibit.

Let the kids lead the way and encourage discussion about what you are seeing.  What would you do if you saw a friend being bullied—or worse?  You can’t help but talk about that when you walk through the Power of Children exhibit and see  youngsters have endured.

How different—and how similar—is your life from that of a family living in Egypt? Who exactly was Captain Kidd or Pharaoh Seti I and what do all those funny symbols on the wall of his tomb mean?

If this is your first visit, you’ll be surprised how different this children’s museum may be than others you have visited—that there is as much here for you as your kindergartner or preschooler.

That’s why it’s important to take your time. Don’t rush from checking out the juvenile dinosaurs to checking out Barbie fashions to listening to an actor interpret what it was like to live in war torn Amsterdam under the Nazi regime.  

You can’t possibly see everything in one visit so relax and focus on what interests your kids and you the most. Maybe you have a young dino lover who wants to spend all his time in that one exhibit, even dressing up as a dinosaur. Maybe you have a young fashionista who wants to be in a fashion show or design her own doll clothes in the Barbie exhibit Maybe all your child wants to do is dig for ancient treasure.

Let them! You’ll all have much more fun and learn more too if you aren’t rushing around. Remember, you can always come back. The museum will be here. 
    
Copyright 2011 Eileen Ogintz
(Note: Eileen's TaingtheKids family travel guides have just been reissued for the NOOK and Kindle.  You can buy individual chapters for as little as 99 cents.)

By Dallas Evans, Natural Science Educator/Curator

The pursuit of dinosaurs can entail some hot days, hard labor, and very heavy lifting.  We are lucky to discover and uncover the bones of duckbill dinosaurs at the Ruth Mason Quarry in South Dakota. This remote dig site contains bones by the 1000s, and almost all of them are from the same type of dinosaur—the Edmontosaurus.

These dinosaurs are big.  A full grown Edmontosaurus would weigh as much as 4 tons and be as big as a school bus. But after nearly 10 years of digging at this site, we often want to excavate something that’s different, and well, smaller. 

One of our curators, William Ripley, specializes in the search for “micro fossils.”

It’s a simple yet painstaking process.  William gathers large samples of the rock matrix from where we find the dinosaur bones. He takes it back to the museum and soaks it in water so that it breaks down into a thick, gooey mud. Then he washes all that mud through a screen. After it dries he looks at the remaining debris to locate any of the small fossils.

It takes a very special kind of person to spend long hours sorting through debris in the search for micro fossils. And by all accounts William is considered a very special person. He extols the importance of Danish death metal music, World War 2 re-enactment, and chocolate pudding pie, all while looking for tiny fossil bones and teeth.  But he finds some amazing stuff.

He has found small bones from big dinosaurs like Triceratops, T. rex  and Ankylosaur.  And he’s found the small bones from small dinosaurs too—like Pachycephalosaur, Dromaeosaur and Troodon.

His research has shown that where we dig was once a near shore, delta-like environment.   William has discovered fish scales, ray and shark teeth, and even crocodile & turtle bones. 

It takes a sharp eye to find fossils that are often no larger than a dime. And amazingly, it’s these smaller specimens that help fill in the details about the larger dinosaurs. These tiny fossils provide significant clues about the environment in which the duckbill dinosaurs lived.

You and your family can actually join William and myself this summer on one of these digs in Faith, South Dakota. They are an extraordinary family learning vacation opportunity . . . you just might find something, big or small!

By Cathy Donnelly, Manager of Exhibit Development

Today (April 22) is National Jelly Bean Day—a sweet day to come to The Children’s Museum to see eight Jelly Belly® Masterpieces.  Each one is a recreation of a famous artwork, like The Starry Night or Mona Lisa, made entirely out of jelly beans!

All of the jelly bean art was created by Kristen Cumings from Martinez, California. How does she do it? She starts by sketching an image on a framed board.  Next, she sprays an adhesive and sticks the beans, one by one, over the sketch. She might use as many as 20-30 different colors—or flavors—of Jelly Belly® Jelly Beans in each work. And up to 15,000 beans!  When she’s done, she pours a resin over the artwork to keep the beans in place.  It can take more than 60 hours to create just one artwork!

So does she ever snack on the Jelly Belly® beans while she works? Kristen says no, because she’s afraid she won’t be able to stop!  (But she did admit that Sour Cherry was her favorite flavor.)

The jelly bean art is on display at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis until June 1.  Hurry in to see a sweet treat for your eyes!

Check out our Jelly Bean Art page to find some fun activities to try at home on National Jelly Bean Day!

Guest Post By Lori Byrd Phillips, Wikipedian-in-Residence

…A lot, actually!

You first heard from me in December, where I explained my role as Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  My job is to collaborate with Wikipedia in order to share the museum’s resources with a large, online audience. In the past months we’ve been busy doing just that!

One of my primary tasks has been to coordinate a donation of images from the museum to Wikimedia Commons. For our first donation I worked closely with the curators to choose images of objects from the American, Cultural World, and Natural Science collections. You can see the category with these images here. They are now being used in articles across Wikipedia!

In addition to sharing images, it has been important that the museum also share its research with Wikipedia. We did this by working with the Museum Apprentice Program students to research iconic Children’s Museum objects and create new Wikipedia articles about them. This may sound like a tough job – and it was! Over the course of two months, the MAPs worked in teams to research their objects and learn how to edit Wikipedia. In the end, five new articles were created and 33 middle and high school students gained a new appreciation for Wikipedia. Thanks to the MAPs hard work, now people from all around the world can learn about the museum's Chihuly sculpture Fireworks of Glass, the Reuben Wells, Bucky the Teenage T.rex, the water clock, and Captain Kidd’s cannon, without even coming inside the museum! On top of that, the article for the Reuben Wells locomotive was featured on the main page of Wikipedia and received 5,500 views within two days!

The Children’s Museum Carousel received some special attention in Wikipedia as well. Since January, a Wikipedian has been volunteering to help update the Broad Ripple Park Carousel’s Wikipedia article in the hopes of it becoming a Featured Article.  Featured Articles undergo an intense review process and account for only .1% of all of the articles in Wikipedia. With the help of our Wikipedia volunteer and the Children’s Museum’s curators, the Carousel article is now an impressive history of one of the museum’s most iconic objects. Check out the article – I guarantee you’ll learn something new!

This new depth of information in the Carousel article prompted our Director of Web and Emerging Media to want to link the Children’s Museum’s webpage back to Wikipedia. But the biggest and the best Children’s Museum couldn’t do that with some boring little link, so we asked our friends in the Wikipedia community to create a Widget that will boldly share an object’s Wikipedia article on our website. Within days, a new Wikipedia Widget tool was created and you can now see it in use on the Museum History, Carousel, and All Aboard!, webpages.

These are only some of the ways that museums all over the world are beginning to share their research and content with Wikipedia. Since I started here about seven months ago, our Australian friend Liam (who visited the Children’s Museum back in November) has continued to travel the globe to help museums learn how to work with Wikipedia, a network of GLAM Ambassadors is beginning to be created, and more Wikipedians-in-Residence are beginning work in places like the Palace of Versailles in France and soon at the National Archives in Washington DC. It’s definitely an exciting time to be a Wikipedian in a museum!

Another post by one of our fabulous interns!

By Rachel Lemon, News Editorial and Public Relations Intern

Growing up I came to The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis a few times with my family. It was always magical to explore the exhibits; it felt like I was transported back in time walking through some of the exhibits. I came back my sophomore year of college with my family and my little cousins loved it. As an adult I realized it wasn't just filled with experiences for children; I still saw the magic of The Children’s Museum.

I am a news editorial and public relations major at Franklin College, and I needed to get an internship for credit. I thought what better place than The Children’s Museum. They have many areas of study for people to intern in; one of them happened to be public relations.
Interning here has been an amazing experience. I have the opportunity to see firsthand how the practice of public relations is incorporated into a non-profit organization. There is a lot of planning and behind the scenes work that public relations has to do in promoting The Children’s Museum.

I’m using a lot of my knowledge and education from classes and reading assignments, while interning here. It’s one thing to read and use what you’ve learned in class assignments, but it’s a different learning experience entirely putting your knowledge to use in the work environment. There is the opportunity not only to get experience in a specific area of study, but also the opportunity to acquire more professional development skills. Interns get to meet, talk, and eat with the CEO and President of the museum in order to expand professional development. I’ve worked in many places, and I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet anyone higher than a supervisor let alone have a conversation with them.

Along with getting experience, interns have the opportunity to explore and get more of a behind the scenes look at the museum. At one of the orientations interns are required to attend, I learned about the history of The Children’s Museum. At the same orientation I got a tour of collections, which is where all of the artifacts are stored when they are not on loan or display. The tour of collections was amazing to see; I’ve come to the museum a few times and had no idea of all the amazing items that are stored in collections. I honestly didn’t even though there was a collections area.

I am truly enjoying my time interning here, which is going by so fast. One of the best parts about interning here is you get to see the exhibits, not to mention a free membership for a year to come back and explore exhibits.

This Week's WOW introduces you to a few of the costumes that will be featured in our spring break exhibit, Incredible Costumes from Film and TV. Christy O'Grady, Chief Conservator, and Cathy Hamaker, Exhibit Developer take you behind-the-scenes into the collection area and explain the process of preparing costumes for display in the exhibit. Surprisingly it's not as easy as it looks!

One of the most interesting things I learned was that they actually had to build padding onto some of the mannequins so that the costumes would lay correctly. Some costumes, like the Ben Affleck's Daredevil costume, took the team more than 3 hours to get onto the mannequin. It was created from a mold of his body and constructed to fit him exactly.

Of course Josh and Mookie throw their usual flair and humor into the WOW. You have to check out the ending...do you think they will make it out by the next episode?!

Incredible Costumes From Film and TV will be a great family learning experience. Costumes engage our imagination and our senses, inspiring us to create incredible stories. We want to see what fun and imaginative costumes and stories you and your family can come up with! Visit our Facebook page and click on the contest tab. Submit a video in your best costume for a chance to win free movie tickets for a year (up to 52 tickets)! And don't forget to visit the exhibit March 12–May 8. It's a great spring break vacation idea for you and your family!