Published: May 10, 2008 12:00 am      

Get your brain wet at exhibit

Great Lakes Children's Museum teaches all about the watershed

TRAVERSE CITY -- The Great Lakes Children's Museum may be located on Grand Traverse Bay, but these days they're encouraging everyone to listen to the river.

The museum is about to unveil its new "Listening to the River" exhibit. The museum was closed for the better part of April as the new exhibit was installed. It's scheduled to reopen midweek.

The exhibit is part of a bigger project that marks a collaborative effort between the Great Lakes Children's Museum, the Land Information Access Association, Northwestern Michigan College's Great Lakes Water Studies Institute and Interlochen Public Radio.

The project was funded for three years through a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Division. The project just entered its third year.

Mary U. Manner, director of education at the Great Lakes Children's Museum, said there are three criteria specified in the grant. The first is that the participants are involved because they want to be and are doing it for fun. The second is that the process must be "learner driven" and not curriculum driven. The final hallmark is that it must be seen as a social activity that is done with other people, through museum or community organizations.

One way the project fulfilled the criteria was by having teens use digital equipment to explore, "capturing the sounds and images of the Grand Traverse Bay watershed that are of interest," Manner said.

Those sites and sounds are used to create pieces that will appear on the www.listeningtotheriver.org Web site, as well as be broadcast on IPR and possibly NPR.

From there, Manner uses that data with the Listening to the River exhibit at the museum.

"That exhibit is aimed at elementary school kids, so we're using high school kids to generate content to teach about the watershed to the elementary school kids and younger," she said.

A big piece of the project is a map featuring events, points of interests, sites, sounds and stories, Manner said.

"It shows how there is another way of looking at community besides the political boundaries around our state, county, township, city," she said. "There is a natural boundary called a watershed that creates a community and that's really fundamental to this project."

Other activities help kids understand their sense of place and effect on their watershed, Manner said. Their actions will be reflected in the central part of the exhibit -- the "watershedometer."

"As the kids are interacting with the different exhibit areas," Manner said, "their actions are actually sending either blue or brown balls from their stations, through the tube in the ceiling, through the floor and then into the watershedometer."

If they're doing something that is healthy for the watershed, a blue ball will appear. If they're doing something that's not healthy for the environment, a brown ball appears.

There's also a Garbage In/Garbage Out activity that teaches proper ways to dispose of different items; a global positioning system that simplifies map coordinates as students move a giant chess-like piece; an invasive species activity that involves moving an indigenous creature through a maze while avoiding invasive species, water quality activities and "Sites and Sounds of the Watershed."

The exhibit is designed in what Manner refers to as "layers." The "frog" layer is geared towards preschoolers. Five- to 10-year-olds can become "citizen scientists." The final layer, for kids over 10 and adults, features more text and reading.

For more information on the project, visit www.listeningtotheriver.org or call the Great Lakes Children's Museum at 932-4526.