The Children’s Museum’s Urban Environmental Exhibition

The Children's Museum is requesting $910,088 from the National Science Foundation to create an exhibition to go in an Urban Environmental Center to be built on a barge anchored in Fort Point Channel, a 500-foot-wide Boston Harbor waterway in front of the Museum. Our goal is to create exhibits which broaden public access to the process of science while extending each person's awareness of an engagement in this particular waterfront environment. Barge exhibits are focused on water, which has universal appeal to children and is the central feature of our location; atmosphere -- birds, sun, solar radiation, shadow, light refraction and diffraction, heat, wind, and clouds; built environment -- architecture, engineering, buildings, technology -- and their relationship to living things. We will provide a wide menu of entry-level approaches to the environment that are not given in school. The exhibits will take a visitor from where s/he is at the beginning of the visit to a new level of curiosity and concern. Through observation and direct experimentation, children will see what varies with the tides, what flows into the Channel from street run-off, where different creatures nest, what is emitted into the atmosphere from cars and buildings, and many other things. Some exhibits invite a playful experience, involving the senses and whole body; others offer a more focused exploration to uncover principles of a phenomenon. All encourage practice in such scientific processes as observing, collecting, recording, and comparing data.