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Making Discoveries

Kids’ Learning Destinations

by

Marla Hardee Milling photo

Marla Hardee Milling photo

Forget the days of stuffy museums with ropes to keep the hands of little visitors from getting too close to the objects. Today, many museums are geared for kids of all ages with interactive play, colorful exhibits, and rich opportunities for hands-on learning amid the fun. We are fortunate in our region to have a wide assortment of places where parents, grandparents and children can make new discoveries together. 

Kidsenses

Downtown Rutherfordton, North Carolina, may be a small town, but it will soon be home to an extraordinary resource for the community and the region. It’s already home to KidSenses, an 11,000-square-foot learning museum, geared to families with children up to age 10. But next year, the facility will expand to a 27,000-foot campus with the addition of a second building located behind the museum and adjacent to the outdoor discovery garden. “The Factory” is themed after the growing Maker Movement and gives participants a place to meet and make things. It’s designed for older children, teens and adults. 

“It will be a true destination experience for WNC and beyond,” said KidSenses Executive Director Willard Whitson. “We call it whole family engagement. We are currently conducting preview programming for The Factory in a town building. We’re doing everything from 3D printing to laser cutting to making Christmas ornaments to coding and robotics.”

The Factory will be comprised of four main areas: the first is a Tech Lab, which will be equipped with computers, 3-D printers, laser cutters and other cutting-edge technology. There will also be a general workshop called the Make It Place complete with conventional tools (both power and manual), a food studio with a fully functioning kitchen and an Idea Zone for collaboration and team building. The plan is to open this facility from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., which will allow for corporate team building and make it a true community resource. 

The current KidSenses museum opened in 2004 as part of a plan to help revitalize the Main Street area.  Exhibits include a fire station with a real fire truck, a TV studio where kids can do their own reports, a scaled down grocery store that’s phenomenally popular, a vet clinic, creation station, a ZAP Theatre with a musical Tesla Coil, and an Alphabet Trail for kids ages four and under. 

“It includes scaled-down versions of the town,” Whitson said. “A lot of what happens here is role-playing and a scaled-down experience of potential future careers. They are learning through play and learning what the real world is like.” 

Birthday parties are also in big demand at KidSenses, and Whitford said themes are available, such as having Elsa from Frozen pay a visit, or Ironman. The Factory will extend their special event reach by offering a place for weddings, family reunions, social events and company meetings. 

“We’re very proud of what we have here,” Whitson said. “It’s a key element in defining the character of this community.” 

Hands On! Discovery Center

The Hands On! Discovery Center held a spot in downtown Johnson City, Tennessee, for 30 years, but now its in a new location sharing space with the ETSU Museum of Natural History in nearby Gray, Tennessee. This facility was built in 2007 adjacent to the Gray Fossil Site, a Pilocene-era sinkhole filled with fossils dating back almost five million years. DOT crews discovered the site in May 2000 while digging to widen State Road 75. Once the first fossils were identified, the governor approved realignment of the road project to preserve the valuable site. 

Hands On! made the move in June 2018 and celebrates its increased accessibility. “This location is much more centrally located for the audience we serve, which extends from northeast Tennessee to southwest Virginia, a little bit into Kentucky and North Carolina. We are more centrally located and have a parking lot and elevator,” said Kristine Carter, vice president of marketing and events. 

A Paleo Tower is one of the first things visitors see when entering the building. Kids and brave adults can climb it and see the building from a different perspective. Other exhibits feature the skeletons representative of animals found at the fossil site, as well as 3D models of the fossils to touch, gravity dish, ring launcher, PVC pipe organ, a topobox (augmented reality sandbox to create different geological formations), a construction area where wood planks can be used to create a variety of towers and objects, art rooms filled with supplies, and a 200,000-volt Tesla Coil that, once energized, lights and responds to music. The Tesla shows occur several times each day. 

“The exhibits that we’ve brought in are for a much wider age range—really all ages. We encourage interactions from a multi-generational standpoint amongst families and teachers with students. It’s not just let your kids run and play, it’s interact with your kids, explore with them and discover with them. We have adult groups who come in, and senior groups,” Carter said. “We are in a much better position to be an all ages science center than we were before.

“There’s something new every visit. Our exhibits are open ended. The experience you have one day will be different from another day. It’s completely up to you what you want to make out of that exhibit experience. Each visit is unique.” 

Gray Fossil Site

For the price of Hands On! admission, visitors have a chance to walk outside to see the fossil dig site. During May through October, they’re likely to see students, staff and volunteers digging and collecting more fossil remnants. So far they’ve unearthed a wide variety of creatures: saber tooth cat, alligator, tapir, rhinoceros, short-faced bar, mastodon, and hundreds of plants and others.

Marla Hardee Milling photo

Marla Hardee Milling photo

Marla Hardee Milling photo

Paleontologist Chris Widga serves as the head curator for the ETSU Museum of Natural History. He says some of his students pursued careers with fossils after exposure to the fossil site as children. “We have a number of students, grad students and alumni who started out as high school volunteers and kept volunteering throughout their degrees.” 

While they share the physical space, Hands On! operates separately from ETSU’s museum and programs. “The way the collaboration works is they do a lot of the routine daily and weekly events,” Widga said. “We’re talking about doing more detailed tours of the fossil site and we’re working with Hands On! to develop more of that programming. We just hired a new staff member and his title is science communicator. Part of his responsibilities is to develop that over the next year.”

Widga’s group provides four special events for the public each year—an Archaeology Day in late August, International Red Panda Day in mid-September, National Fossil Day in mid-November, and this year the facility will celebrate Darwin Day on February 9. 

“On those days, it’s our opportunity to pull out all the stops and showcase our science and interact with the public in a very seamless and informal way,” Widga said. “Rather than bringing the public behind the scenes every day, we’re bringing our science out on the floor four times a year. We also do some fossil ID nights quarterly, so there are always events going on.”

At the National Fossil Day last November, Widga worked with the ETSU digital media group to design a virtual reality experience for participants. 

“We have 20,000 bones that we have mapped in our backyard from the Gray Fossil Site since 2004 and they are in a 3D map,” he said. “We’ve been talking to them about how we visualize that. They brought out their VR headsets and you could literally swim through the excavated portions of the Gray Fossil Site and it would look like you were swimming through space because each bone was represented by a little white globe, so 20,000 globes that you could navigate through. It was a jaw-dropping experience.”

Widga said he’s hoping to eventually get the virtual reality experience installed in the main exhibits. He explains how it could potentially work. “Someone would put on a VR headset and navigate through the bones, but the video would also be ported out to a large monitor,” he said. “We have to be able to scale it up so it can be experienced by many people at once. We have to think outside of the box. We want to try things and tweak them.” 

WNC Nature Center

Karen Babcock quickly mentioned the Gray Fossil Site when talking about new initiatives taking shape at the WNC Nature Center, where she is executive director.

“We have just begun our first phase of our Prehistoric Appalachian project of which the red pandas will be the first animals introduced. The red panda is the closest living relative to the extinct Bristol’s Panda that used to roam in these mountains,” Babcock said. “We had pandas here and all types of species that people wouldn’t think existed unless they go to the Gray Site.” 

Last year Asheville City Council approved spending $184,820 to build a red panda exhibit at the WNC Nature Center. 

Photo courtesy of Friends of the WNC nature Center

Friends of the WNC Nature Center photo

“We belong to, and we are accredited by, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums,” said Babcock. “As a member of AZA, we are participating in the species survival plan and red pandas are part of that plan.” 

Other animals at the Nature Center include wolves, coyote, deer, black bears, bobcats, otters, snakes, and more. 

The WNC Nature Center unveiled a new main entrance in September, designed to make the check-in process smoother, provide enhanced parking, and created a separate entrance for school groups. 

Director of Engagement Leah Craig Fieser says the additional entrance allows them to accommodate more school groups coming for field trips. “They have the option of coming and enjoying the Nature Center and they can also schedule interactive learning experiences with our educators,” she said. “They work the programs into the curriculum of the school system. It’s a great way to bring science to life for kids and have a hands-on learning experience. We also have an educator whose whole job is to spread the educational program beyond the doors of the Nature Center. For schools that might not have transportation or funding to come to the Nature Center, we make it really accessible to bring educators out to where they are.” 

It’s a program that’s drawing national attention. In September of last year, the AZA presented the WNC Nature Center with its 2018 Education Award for significant achievement in the “Expanding Impact through Targeted Low Income Outreach Education” program. 

Individuals also benefit from the learning opportunities at the Nature Center. There are opportunities throughout the year to take part in special events like the Junior Wild Walk, held monthly, that allows kids and their parents a behind-the-scenes look at the care for the animals, and a chance to participate in feedings. 

A family membership is a great way to enjoy unlimited visits to the WNC Nature Center. It costs $69 a year for two adults and up to four children. Other special programming includes a chance to adopt a Nature Center animal and create an enrichment for that animal during special Wild Parent days, a Critter Checkup where kids can bring a stuffed animal in for a vet checkup, and a Hey Day festival in the fall. There’s also a summer camp and chances for teenagers to apply to become volunteers through the Young Naturalists and Young Curators programs. 

Zoo Knoxville photo

Photo courtesy of Zoo Knoxville

Zoo Knoxville

Zoo Knoxville has had a successful red panda program for a while and offers a variety of programs for children.

Field trips give regional students an opportunity to learn about wildlife and wild places from all over the planet. 

Night Safaris take guests on an after-hours tour of the zoo to see what happens when the sun goes down.

Zoo day camps occur throughout the year for kids ages 4-13. Camp activities include animal interactions, games, crafts, fun activities, excursions through the zoo and trips behind-the-scenes to learn how we care for zoo animals.

Team ECCO Aquarium and Shark Lab

You might think you have to go to the coast to learn about sea life, but Brenda Ramer has changed that with her Team ECCO Aquarium and Shark Lab, located on Main Street in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It has the distinction of being the first inland aquarium in North Carolina. 

“I was teaching school and realized that 60 to 65-percent of our kids don’t see blue water and don’t have a chance to see it. They really can’t comprehend it,” Ramer said. “I decided to do more than give them a book and a DVD. I had never seen blue water until I was in my mid-30s. I went to the Florida Keys, went snorkeling and that was all it took. It was like a baptism.”

She went on to get her scuba certification and worked as a dive instructor, but the desire to bring the ocean to mountain students burned bright in her heart. 

She opened a small 800-foot classroom in 2009 with a few tanks. In 2011, she move into her current space on Main Street, rebranded the business and opened as an aquarium. It’s the only ocean education lab and hands-on marine study center in Western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina and eastern Tennessee. 

The facility raises baby sharks for research and is celebrating a miracle birth after a female bamboo shark pup was hatched from a parthenogenesis egg, meaning an egg that developed without fertilization. “It’s literally a miracle—a virgin birth” Ramer said. “The last successful study was in 1999 at the Detroit Aquarium. We are now on the forefront —right here on Main Street in Hendersonville.”

Team ECCO is open to the public from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Tuesday is reserved for its outreach program, which exposes rural children to sea life. It also hosts a variety of programs during the morning hours.

“This is a passion for me,” Ramer said. “Students come in and train with me. Almost every exhibit is designed and maintained by students from fifth grade to college. Five of my kids here are on the autism spectrum and one has Down’s Syndrome. It’s neat to reach across school lines, socio-economic lines and learning lines and form a team.”

The Children's Museum of the Upstate

More than 200,000 people visit the 80,000-square-foot Children’s Museum of the Upstate every year in Greenville, South Carolina, and the museum will celebrate its 10th anniversary in July. 

Director of Programming Jessica Hayes said the museum will have special events throughout the year as part of the celebration, but is planning a large event in July. Keep an eye out for details at tcmupstate.org. 

Last spring, the museum added a second location in Spartanburg, for children ages 5 and under. The age range is broader at the Greenville location and the space is bigger with 20 exhibits. It unveiled a space-themed exhibit in February with programming and science demonstrations called “random acts of science.” 

TCMU also pays attention to the needs of children with special needs. “We have monthly sensory days for children with special needs. They are always welcome at the museum, of course, but are especially welcome on these sensory-friendly days where we adapt programming even more for them. For example, at a recent one, we opened the museum an hour early on a Sunday and they were able to come in and meet therapy dogs, listen to a story with the therapy dogs in the room, make dog crafts and then they were able to take a stuffed dog home. We do these monthly and we switch up the themes and we switch up the days because we know some families can come during the week and some can come on the weekends. We try to make it something for everyone.” 

The museum also offers a Parent’s Night Out a couple of times a year from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Kids have dinner, play and crafts while mom and dad get a date night or a chance to unwind. 

Children's Museum of Oak Ridge

Lots of adults travel through children’s museums in the region with their kids and grandkids, but what if you don’t have a child to take along? At the Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, all ages are welcome. “Most children’s museums don’t allow adults who don’t have children with them to come in and visit,” said Executive Director Beth Shea. “We find grownups enjoy the museum, too. We are a museum for all ages.” 

Another thing that sets this museum apart is that it’s located in a historical schoolhouse building within the boundaries of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. The building once served as the Highland View Elementary School. It’s 54,000-square-feet of space pays homage to its history as well as offering fun exhibits, play spaces and chances for interactive learning. 

“We are on eight acres of land,” said Shea. “We have over 20 exhibits for visitors to enjoy. It’s hard to see it all in one visit.” 

She’s excited about a new addition to the museum’s campus—a Flattop House that will be open to guests sometime in 2019. The house—an example of the homes built for Manhattan Project workers - was on exhibit at the American Museum of Science and Energy for a decade. When the AMSE moved last fall it no longer had space for the house and donated it to the museum. “I call it the original tiny house,” Shea said. It’s 576-square-feet, containing two bedrooms, one bath and combination living-dining room. The Flattop House will become a permanent exhibit with volunteers trained as docents to tell about the history of the Oak Ridge region and the Manhattan Project, the top-secret World War II era research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons.

The museum hosts birthday parties, after-school programs, volunteer opportunities and special events throughout the year. Shea says the museum’s 20th Annual International Festival will bring many people to their site on February 17. It runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and features entertainment, crafts and food from cultures around the world. The Knoxville Area Model Railroaders, which maintains its clubhouse and workshops at the museum, will operate trains at the World of Trains exhibit from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and if the weather is right, the Train Garden will be open. 

Want to go? 

Asheville Museum of Science

Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge

Hands On! Children’s Museum

Hands On! Discovery Center and Gray Fossil Site

KidSenses Children’s Interactive Museum and The Factory

Team ECCO Aquarium & Shark Lab 

The Children’s Museum of the Upstate

The Muse

WNC Nature Center

Zoo Knoxville

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