Tag Archives: museum of arts and sciences

Helping Out With Summer Camp

This week is the last week of my internship! It’s very sad, as I grew to really love the position and the people that I got to know because of it. The time flew by incredibly quickly. (A side note: I can’t believe the semester starts so soon, as well!) For my last week at the museum, I have been helping out/have plans to help out with a specific summer camp that one of my supervisors are running. It’s a science-based camp and the activities are run from a National Geographic activity box. The reason that I was specifically recruited is because of my specialized knowledge in rocks and minerals, and the box is partially focused towards that. One of the activities is to make your own crystals by mixing a few things together and letting it sit all week. (The kids will get them back on Friday!) Another activity they did was excavating their own minerals, such as pyrite (fool’s gold) and types of quartz, most commonly rose quartz.

Other activities the camp got up to included making volcanos! I’m not quite sure how the volcanos are meant to explode as that’s happening later in the week, but the kids were able to mix their own plaster and scoop it into a mold. The concoction was let out of the mold after thirty minutes and is not sitting to dry for a few days. The reason we did these two activities the first day is because they’re the ones that need more than one day to complete. Later in the week, they’ll be able to paint their volcanoes and explode them, as well as see how their crystals turned out. While I didn’t help out in the afternoon class today, I popped into the morning class which was about comics where the kids are spending the week learning how a multi act story is formed and then making it into a comic book that they’ll draw themselves throughout the week. It was still a lot of fun!

Organizing Fossils

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Now that the exhibit, Tech Savvy, has been opened, the office is looked for another big project to take up. Of course, the Summer Learning Institute (which is what the museum’s summer camp is called) is still underway, as well as any scheduled tours. This means that I’ve been busying myself helping out with the summer camp (watching over classes while they’re eating lunch or other tasks like that) in the afternoon while my mornings are taken up with tours of our Root and Sloth galleries with outside summer camps. A lot of aspects of the internship have become fairly routine and comfortable by this point. For example, I’ve become so familiar with the material I speak on when I give tours that I doubt I’ll forget it once I leave, so I’ll gain a plethora of new fun facts.

Beyond this, however, there’s a storage room that has some fossil material in it that’s part of the education department. It was mentioned to me upon first starting here that it might be part of my responsibilities to sort through it and organize it and, once seeing it, it is certainly a daunting task. I helped the department come up with a system that would help organize the materials in there. I found some affordable clear storage bins that could fit on shelves and have doors that open outwards (like a microwave) so it would be more easily accessible. They liked my idea and it sounded like they might go ahead and buy them, so in my future, sorting the storage room may be ahead of me.

James Webb Telescope Photo Release

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NASA released photos from the James Webb telescope this Tuesday that just passed. I heard about it immediately because education’s office where I have my desk is shared by planetarium staff, so of course they were talking about it as soon as the photos were released to the public, as well as the buildup leading up to the release. While the release was on Tuesday, it’s exciting for the museum, because we were able to already get the first four photos that were released from the telescope printing and put up in the planetarium lobby and replace four older photos that were taken from the Hubble telescope. The four photos we put up on the wall was the nebula, the quintet of galaxies, the deep field which the deepest and sharpest infrared photo of the universe to date (the photo contains galaxies that are billion of years old, created during the initial Big Bang), and then lastly, the most visually appealing, the Carina Nebula. We’re going to add labels to them soon, but they’re already up and ready to be seen.

While the James Webb telescope offered a nice getaway from a current large project, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We’re currently in a bit of a limbo situation. We need to start moving objects into the gallery, as well as cleaning them up. However, they have a planned floor cleaning in the gallery, so our schedule got moved back a day, so we have a day less to get the Tech Savvy exhibit setup. So, between Tuesday and Friday, we will be cleaning the exhibit pieces and moving them into the gallery, and Monday they will be moving everything out, I presume, while they do the floor and gallery cleaning before the new items are moved in and arranged. It’s all very exciting! We’re getting very close to the opening of the exhibit.

Nearing the Deadline

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Tomorrow (Monday) will be the last day that I can submit labels for the exhibit. It’s because the exhibit, named Tech Savvy, officially goes out July 23rd. I only have two more assigned labels to do, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get them done. Information about the exhibit was covered in the Museum of Arts and Sciences newsletter. The front cover emphasizes the exhibit with a phonograph on display and the words “Tech Savvy: Home Technology from the 1890s-1990s” written beside it. We actually have technology from the 2000s, like an iMac, which will be in the exhibit that will show “the future” aspect of technology.

The opportunity I had to get to work alongside this curation project has been so much fun. I’m so incredibly happy that I’ve had this opportunity, too, because knowing that I want to work in museums but now exactly knowing where (curation, education, etc.), getting a bunch of different experiences is exactly what I need. I’d never expect that I’d have this much fun doing a curation project, but it’s made me consider looking more in that direction for the future.

Something cool which popped up from my position here at MOAS is that in this summer newsletter, they have a section where they highlight their interns. There’s only one intern per department, so there’s me in the education department and one intern in the curation department, and we each got to turn in a photo of ourselves, as well as a paragraph about ourselves. These feature pretty early on in the newsletter and it’s super neat!

MOAS Tour Exhibits

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Before officially starting at the museum, they gave me a packet for which I could get familiar with the information that pertains to two particular exhibits: The Root Family Exhibit and the Prehistoric Exhibit. The Root Family Exhibit was an exhibit donated to the museum by Chapman Root; the collection began with his grandfather, C. J. Root. The exhibit covers many things – teddy bears, train cars, classic cars, but most importantly, what ties the collection together is Coca Cola. The Root Family was instrumental into the development of the bottle that holds Coca Cola to this day. If you ever visit the museum, you will see an entire wall of bottles that were prototypes for Coca Cola but didn’t last, for one reason or another. In an adjoining gallery, the same goes for vending machines that dished out the beverage. There’s a bunch of them of them to show how they changed over the years.

The Prehistoric Gallery is another big one on tours. Kids tend to love it, because the star of the gallery is our giant ground sloth, which could stand up to thirteen feet tall. Last time I did this tour, a student asked me: “why is a dinosaur standing behind you?” It’s also a lot of fun, because the giant ground sloth and mastodon were both found and dug up in Daytona, which is a point of pride for the museum. Plus, Florida doesn’t get many giant fossil finds. Additionally, the giant ground sloth at MOAS is the most complete giant ground sloth in all of North America, so it has been used to make casts for other museums in the country. Pretty cool!