November 23 2008
On November 23rd, 2008, I went on the scholars field trip to the Marian Koshland Science Museum in northwest Washington D.C. The museum is pretty small, as it is just one floor, but it still had different interesting exhibits about public health and the sciences that can aid it, the effects of global warming, and infectious diseases. The first exhibit that I visited was the Wonders of Science one. In this exhibit, I watched a video narrated by Matt Damon that explained the need for clean water and the various diseases that are caused by the lack of it. This exhibit, just like the other ones in the museum grabbed my attention because the video is interesting. The video is factually correct too because it used public health officials as direct sources and footage from other countries afflicted by the lack of clean water. The two other exhibits I visited dealt with the global warming issue. One of them, named Human Influence Upon the Natural Climate System = A Changing but Uncertain Future got across the point that humans have a big effect on the climate. For this display, three different pictures of the same mountain from 1928, 1979, and 2003 are shown side by side. I could see how much snow melted from the mountain range over the years, and it’s a lot. The display shows the vast differences of snow on the mountains, but the difference could be exaggerated too. Photography has gotten better over the years, so the pictures could be a little misleading, but the point of the display is obvious. The second display I went to was The Natural Carbon Balance. This display showed a dissolving rock and brine shrimp inside of a water-filled sphere sealed off from the outside environment. The sphere was surrounded by information about the natural carbon cycle. The dissolving rock was supposed to show how carbon breaks things down overtime, but I really didn’t see an example of any short-term effects of carbon or what it does. This display visually interested me, so that’s why I started reading the text that surrounded it. The last two exhibits I went to see were about infectious diseases. The Why Get Vaccinated displayed electronically showed scenarios and numbers about the controlled or uncontrolled spread of diseases. I pushed different buttons on the interactive screen for different scenarios. Based on the inputs that I pushed, the screen displayed how many people would get infected by diseases. This display interested me because it was interactive, and I could control the information I got from it. The main point though was that people need to be vaccinated for the greater health of the population. The last display I visited was Exponential Growth, which showed that bacteria grow a whole lot in a short period of time. Marbles that were in tubes were meant to represent bacteria and its growth. The first tube just had 1 marble in it, but the fourth tube (which represented 12 hours later) had 65,536 marbles in it. Most of the displays in this museum were interactive, and the made the museum experience interesting, but I can see that interactive displays can also have negatives. People in the museum could easily damage a display by accident by just pushing a button or sliding a screen with a little too much force. Also, unlike other museums, these displays don’t move or do anything like that. You have to read a lot at this museum, or just watch a video. Even though the Koshland Museum is small and private, they still can hold their own to attract customers. Koshland though could advertise using different media mediums to attract more people and get the name out there. One thing they do well though is the staff there interacts with the people in the museum. The staff helps the people in the museum and does more than just direct you to a display, they actually try teaching you the things on their displays, unlike bigger museums.