Building Bridges Between Civil Engineers and Science Museums ROBERT REITHERMAN, THALIA ANAGNOS, AND WENDY MELUCH a study funded by the National Science Foundation

Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering 1301 S. 46th Street, Building 420, Richmond, CA 94804 USA 1-510-665-3529 curee@curee.org http://www.curee.org

used with permissionby the Golden Gate Bridge,

www.goldengate.org

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ISBN 1-931995-31-1 First printing May 2008 Printed in the United States of America by Minuteman Press, Berkeley, California Copyright 2008 Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering Published by:

Photo credit key: Photos of individual museums are from the respective museums unless otherwise credited RR = Robert Reitherman Title page photo used with permission by the Golden Gate Bridge, www.goldengate.org

Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) 1301 S. 46th Street, Building 420, Richmond, CA 94804 USA tel: (510) 665-3529 email: curee@curee.org website: http://www.curee.org

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Table of Contents Chapter 1 Two Communities With Mutually Supportive Goals........................................1 Chapter 2 Understanding Civil Engineering........................................................................7

Historical Background ...........................................................................................................7 Civil Engineering Disciplines................................................................................................8 Construction Engineering ....................................................................................................10 Environmental Engineering .................................................................................................12 Geotechnical Engineering....................................................................................................14 Structural Engineering .........................................................................................................16 Transportation Engineering .................................................................................................18 Water Resources Engineering..............................................................................................19 Types of Employment..........................................................................................................20 Civil Engineering: Academia and Research ........................................................................21 Civil Engineering Practice ...................................................................................................22

Chapter 3 Understanding Science Museums......................................................................25

Historical Background .........................................................................................................25 Science Centers....................................................................................................................28 Combining Engineering With Art........................................................................................29 Informal Science Education.................................................................................................32 Public Understanding of Research.......................................................................................33 Learning Through Inquiry ...................................................................................................34 Visitors, Users, Audiences, Markets....................................................................................35 Physical Characteristics of the Museum..............................................................................36 The Civil Engineering Work Itself As The Exhibit .............................................................39 Institutions Other Than Science Museums ..........................................................................42 Types of Museum Professionals ..........................................................................................43 Types of Museum Programs ................................................................................................54 Gift Shop and Visitor Center Products ................................................................................57 Financial Realities................................................................................................................57 Curricular Connections ........................................................................................................59

Chapter 4 Purposes of Partnerships Between Civil Engineers and Science Museums ..64

Civil Engineering Themes as Ways for Visitors to Understand the World Around Them .64 Recruitment of Future Engineers.........................................................................................65 Fulfilling Education and Outreach Requirements of Research Projects..............................66 Public Understanding of Engineering..................................................................................66 Preservation of Civil Engineering History...........................................................................70

Chapter 5 Demographic Considerations ............................................................................74

Demographic Aspects of the Civil Engineering Profession ................................................74 Demographic Aspects of Visitors of Science Museums......................................................78

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Chapter 6 Vignettes of Exhibits and Other Offerings.......................................................84 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) - Reston, Virginia.......................................85 Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum - Ann Arbor, Michigan .....................................................86 B&O Railroad Museum - Baltimore, Maryland ..................................................................87 California Science Center - Los Angeles, California ..........................................................88 Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose - San Jose, California .....................................89 Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering - Richmond, CA .....90 Deutsches Museum - Munich, Germany .............................................................................92 Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution - Kobe, Japan ...............................94 Exploratorium - San Francisco, California ..........................................................................95 Field Museum - Chicago, Illinois ........................................................................................96 KidZone - Hemet, California ...............................................................................................97 Liberty Science Center Skyscraper Exhibit - Jersey City, New Jersey ...............................99 Louisville Science Center - Louisville, Kentucky .............................................................101 Museum of Science - Boston, Massachusetts ....................................................................102 Museum of Science and Industry - Chicago, Illinois.........................................................104 Museum of Science and Industry - Tampa Bay, Florida ...................................................105 National Building Museum - Washington, District of Columbia......................................106 National Engineers Week (nationwide).............................................................................107 National Museum of American History - Washington, District of Columbia...................108 Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum - Galveston, Texas .................................109 Princeton University Art Museum - Princeton, New Jersey..............................................110 Reuben H. Fleet Science Center - San Diego, California..................................................112 San Francisco Bay Model - Sausalito, California..............................................................113 Science Museum of Minnesota - Minneapolis, Minnesota................................................115 Sciencenter - Ithaca, New York.........................................................................................117 Shizuoka Prefectural Earthquake Preparedness Education Center - Shizuoka, Japan ......119 Skyscraper Museum - New York, New York....................................................................120 Tech Museum of Innovation - San Jose, California ..........................................................121 Tongji University, State Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering -Shanghai, China .................................................................................................................123

Chapter 7 The Designer’s Toolbox....................................................................................125

Facility Requirements ........................................................................................................125 Safety .................................................................................................................................125 Durability ...........................................................................................................................127 Accessibility.......................................................................................................................127 Security ..............................................................................................................................128 Aesthetics...........................................................................................................................128 Traveling Exhibits..............................................................................................................129 Scale Models and Similitude .............................................................................................129 The Exhibit the Museum Already Has: Itself ....................................................................133

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Appendix A Civil Engineering Terminology....................................................................134 Appendix B Science Museum Terminology......................................................................136 Appendix C Directory of Information on Civil Engineering..........................................138

American Academy of Environmental Engineers .............................................................138 American Society of Civil Engineers ................................................................................138 American Society for Engineering Education ...................................................................139 Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors .................................139 Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering...............................139 National Academy of Engineering ....................................................................................140 National Council of Structural Engineering Associations.................................................140 National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering ....................................................140 Structural Engineers Associations .....................................................................................141

Appendix D Directory of Information on Science Centers and Science Museums.......142

Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) .....................................................................142 American Association of Museums...................................................................................142 Association of Zoos and Aquariums..................................................................................142 Association of Science-Technology Centers .....................................................................143 Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education ............................................143 Ecsite..................................................................................................................................143 Informalscience..................................................................................................................144 Institute for Learning Innovation.......................................................................................144 Museum Education Roundtable.........................................................................................144 National Center for Technological Literacy ......................................................................145 National Science Teachers Association.............................................................................145 National Science Foundation .............................................................................................146 University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments ................146 Visitor Studies Association................................................................................................147

Cited References...................................................................................................................148

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Acknowledgments The National Science Foundation funded the work that resulted in this publication under an Informal Science Education grant, NSF ESI-0529213 to the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the National Science Foundation. The NSF program officer was Dr. Al DeSena. The expertise of the project’s Steering Committee is gratefully acknowledged: Dr. Thalia Anagnos, Professor of General Engineering San Jose State University San Jose, California Jill Andrews, Director Office of Engineering Outreach and Engagement College of Engineering, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan Greg Brown, Vice-President of Content Development Tech Museum of Innovation San Jose, California Sandra E. Menke, Education Specialist Mid-America Earthquake Center University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Dr. Gilbert Mosqueda, Assistant Professor Civil, Structural, & Environmental Engineering, University at Buffalo, New York Andrew Neitlich, Management Consultant IT Business Builders Osprey, Florida

Joseph Nicoletti, Consulting Structural Engineer San Francisco, California Robert Reitherman, Executive Director Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) Richmond, California Dr. Adrian Rodriguez-Marek, Assistant Professor Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering Washington State University Pullman, Washington Dr. Charles Trautmann, Executive Director Sciencenter Ithaca, New York Dr. Peter Wong, Director of University Relations Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts

Lisa Hubbell assisted Wendy Meluch in compiling information on evaluation. Mary Currie, Public Affairs Director of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, kindly provided the title page photograph. CUREE staff members Reed Helgens and Darryl Wong assisted with the overall project tasks and specifically compiled much of the information for the chapter providing vignettes of science museum offerings, and online survey and database functions were designed for CUREE by John-Michael Wong.

Robert Reitherman Executive Director, CUREE

Dr. Thalia Anagnos Department of General Engineering

San Jose State University

Wendy Meluch Visitor Studies Services

March 2008

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Chapter 1 Two Communities With Mutually Supportive Goals This document has two audiences: civil engineers and science museum professionals. Our goal is to provide information and guidance to help bridge between these two communities. We later explain in detail that our definition of the term “science museum,” which we use because it is understandable to a broad audience, includes within it the more recent term “science center.” The typical science center, or science and technology center, is a type of science museum emphasizing hands-on interactivity in its exhibits, and may not have a research mission or preserve collections as some science museums do. Our use of the broad term “science museum” also includes facilities such as called visitor centers, or even museums called art or history museums, as long as they offer to the public “informal” (non-classroom) learning opportunities concerning science and engineering. “Civil engineering,” also defined and discussed in detail later, includes the design, analysis, and construction of such features of our built environment such as bridges, highways, and ports, and the structure of buildings and utility plants. The research conducted in a National Science Foundation-funded project that forms the basis for this publication, (CUREE 2008) points out that the potential is great for collaboration between science museums and civil engineers, and that this aim has been only slightly realized. We have designed this document to facilitate collaboration between these two communities. Any profession or subject area has its own terminology and its own forces that drive it in a particular direction. Civil engineers on the one hand and science museum professionals on the other are two distinctly different groups. However, their goals are mutually supportive in some respects. Both serve to bring to the public knowledge and learning activities. In the case of civil engineers, the public education and outreach goal is usually subsidiary to either a research aim or the demands of professional practice. A large civil engineering research project, for example, may expend five to ten percent of its budget on education and outreach to the public, not counting the undergraduate and especially master’s and PhD students who often are involved as researchers. The primary mandate of most engineering research is to solve a design or technology problem, and so it is understandable that civil engineers do not have science exhibits and similar museum offerings to the public as their first priority. The science museum professional is only rarely employed in a special-purpose facility whose mission is to showcase some aspect of civil engineering. The more common situation is that a science museum has the mission of presenting to its visitors a broad range of subject matter, from what is called pure or natural science (e.g., astronomy, biology) to applied science (e.g., aeronautical engineering, genetic engineering) and to refresh the exhibits frequently to feature topics that are in the news and that an informed citizenry needs to know

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about. Within that broad charter, civil engineering is but one small slice of the pie chart of the museum’s interests. Civil engineering competes for the science museum professional’s attention, and the public’s, alongside genetics, space exploration, climate change, health and medicine, and many other subject areas. This publication is based on the assumption that “the tail can’t wag the dog,” that the overlap in goals of civil engineers and science museums is significant, but comparatively small. This means that some effort and finesse is required to exploit the intersection of the interests of these two communities rather than expecting civil engineering to play a predominant role in a typical science museum. Creativity in seeking out these opportunities is required, which in itself is an opportunity rather than a problem: Designing new solutions is more stimulating than resorting to a recipe book and following what has already been done. The purpose of this document will have been fulfilled if the civil engineer obtains a better understanding of the needs of the science museum professional and can therefore successfully propose a collaboration, and likewise if the latter has more familiarity with civil engineering and is encouraged to explore that subject area with engineers. Graphically, the overlap in goals of the engineer and the science museum professional, as represented by a Venn diagram, is a small area. (John Venn was an English mathematician who advanced the theory of sets, how items share characteristics, and also the theory of probability that is used by engineers today in designing adequately safe construction). The intersection of the two circles, the area representing the common interests of the two communities, is only a small part of each of their own areas (Figure 1-1). However, within that intersection or overlap area, the alignment of goals and interests is very close, and the potential for mutually rewarding collaboration is great. In the NSF-funded project from which this document originated, a survey of both science museum professionals and civil engineers was conducted to try to identify fruitful areas for collaboration. A focus group of fifteen civil engineers and four science museum professionals

Figure 1-1. Illustration of the overlap of interests of science museum professionals and civil engineers

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was queried to try to find areas of common interest. Table 1-1 lists the “menu” from which our focus group was asked to pick their preferences. The preferences of these individuals were generally the same as those of our Advisory Committee (five engineers, six science museum or outreach professionals). Interest in each activity was rated as “high” or “low,” depending on whether more than half of the respondents indicated interest in the activity. If more than half the respondents and Advisory Committee put the item on their list of activities they would be interested in, it is termed high in Table 1-1, while less than half corresponds to low. Note that high does not necessarily mean that the value is so high that it would top other priorities completely outside the scope of engineer-science museum collaboration. For example, a science museum would typically have a very high priority for sustaining itself through a balance of income and expense, while none of the of the activities in Table 1-1 is likely to be a “make or break” item in a museum’s budget. Likewise for the engineering community, few individuals have a full-time commitment to the informal education of a broad public audience. The single most important finding, corroborated by Andrew Neitlich, the management consultant on the project that produced this document, was that there was not enough overlap in what the two groups value to support any activity that demands ongoing staff time or expenditure of funds. This was based on the small group survey information, Advisory Committee meeting results, and input from a session on our project held at the 2006 annual conference of the Association of Science-Technology Centers. Many of the ideas were thought to be worthwhile in a particular context, as a funded project, but could not “carry their own weight” if there were significant associated costs. Simply put, the cost of maintaining the activities of a new network was not considered worth it. There are significant differences between the engineers and science museum professionals. While it might provide some benefit to local schools to develop civil engineering kits in a “lending library,” it turns out to be a significant administrative burden for a museum. Generally speaking, engineers find it difficult to volunteer their time for a full day out of the office, away from duties in a government agency or without producing any billable hours in the case of a consulting engineering firm. This may indicate why the engineers tended to rate a design project in a museum as low on their list. Another example is related to the use of the web. Engineers highly rated the development of standardized web modules on engineering that could be incorporated into the websites of museums. However, given the large amount of web-provided information available, the science museum usually does not feel that one of its main roles is to provide information via that means. The museum typically has a focus on web content that ties to its exhibits and either increases visitor turnout and associated revenue, or provides post-visit enhancement of learning. As the head of Boston’s Museum of Science, Dr. Ioannis Miaoulis, put it, “People interested in science used to have to go to museums. Now, there’s science content available on television and on the Internet 24 hours a day.” (SWE, 2007, p. 40).

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Table 1-1. Valuation of Possible Collaborative Activities By Civil Engineers and Science Museums

Activity Science Museum

Professionals Rating by Civil Engineers

Teaming up engineers, museum professionals, and educators to study how to better tie museum offerings to state and national science education standards

High (standards drive school curricula and also tie to funding from agencies, e.g., NSF)

High (interest in getting more engineering into the schools)

Development of a catalog of engineering content and learning resources that has been or is currently being provided by science museums

High (but not willing to contribute to cost of the maintenance of a web-based catalog)

High (but not willing to contribute to cost of the maintenance of a web-based catalog)

A clearinghouse for engineering researchers on outreach and education opportunities at science museums

High High

Collaboration on exhibits, with engineers providing their expertise to museums on the content communicated in planned exhibits

High (the typical kind of collaboration in the past)

High (engineers are eager to offer their expertise if asked)

The above activities have high mutual ratings; the following are rated high by civil engineers and low by science

museum professionals, or vice versa, or are rated low by both. Communication between museums and engineers via a periodic electronic newsletter

Low (could be redundant with current publications)

High (communication with museums isn’t provided already)

Advance notices to museums of engineering events in their region, such as when engineering conferences are held that may generate newsworthy information on current research or provide a ready source of speakers

Low (speakers usually tie to exhibits or current events; museums seem to be able to locate experts as needed)

High (engineers want to communicate their work to the public)

A clearinghouse for science museums to issue requests for funding and support to the engineering community

High (a possible way to gain funding)

Low (would require education & outreach budget in an engineering project)

Development of “lending library” kits of engineering models and experimentation materials that could be circulated to schools in a museum’s area

Low (a high maintenance activity for the museum)

High

Maintenance of a speakers bureau directory so that museums could easily obtain a speaker or “expert on the floor” in a given city

High Low (though local engineering associations often provide this kind of service)

Development of standardized web modules on engineering that could be incorporated into the websites of museums

Low (museums seek in-person visitors more than web visitors)

High

Involvement of engineers in the evaluation of exhibits

Low (perhaps a “turf” issue; content experts are usually only involved in front-end & formative evaluation or design

High (engineers want to be involved)

Design projects with engineering mentors accessed via the museum’s website or at the museum during special design project days

Low (may be a big effort for the science museum

Low (requires time off from work to participate)

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The engineer who does not understand the role of the websites of science museums may think that they would be ideal (and free) outlets for content about their profession, which is not the case. Thus, both the engineer and the science museum professional must approach a potential collaboration keeping in mind the premise that both groups are already busy, and that only in some particular cases do their interests overlap. It takes creativity to identify an occasional intersection of their interests that merits putting effort into the collaboration – these opportunities do not happen automatically. Also apparent from Table 1-1 is the predictable result that a group that would benefit from an activity but would not have to invest in it may rate it highly, while the other group that would incur the cost to provide the activity to the other group would rate it lower. For example, science museums would like to have a forum for issuing solicitations to the engineering community to advertise for funds and support, while engineers would value a forum that would give them a way to easily arrange outreach outlets for their research projects via science museums. The possible activities in Table 1-1 are best consulted as a reminder of the range of possible collaboration activities, a list of possibilities, one of which may have a high value for both the engineer and the science museum professional in a given case. There is great variety among the individuals in each of the two communities. At the risk of generalizing, we can say that there are some basic orientations shared by most science museum professionals, and likewise among the engineers. Science museum professionals are keenly aware of their visitors. Their visitors, or their audiences and markets, are their reason for existence. The quality of what visitors experience at their facilities and the quantity of visitors largely determine how successful a museum is in fulfilling its mission. To the typical science museum professional, how visitors experience exhibits and other offerings is as important as what the visitors learn. Again hazarding a generalization, we can discuss some traits common to the engineers. For many civil engineers, one of the first steps in developing an effective exhibit in a science museum might be to list information and concepts they would like the visitor to learn. This differs from the science museum professional, whose first step is understanding the audience, and also thinking about the learning mode. “Learning mode” could relate to whether an exhibit is “hands on” and interactive, or displays information via graphic/text panels or computer; whether it is used by the visitors completely on their own (“self-directed”), or whether staff assistance is involved (“mediated experience”); whether the visitors make hypotheses and test them, or follow their curiosity somewhat randomly, trying things out to see what happens. While mere acquisition of specific knowledge is not the prime goal of the science museum professionals, it is good advice for them to respect the expertise of the engineer in evaluating whether the experiences of the visitor have led to valid rather than false conclusions, whether the visitor has achieved some depth of understanding of the engineering thought process. In this over-simplified generalization here, we may approximately categorize the engineer’s orientation as content-based, the museum professional’s as process-based. The civil engineer may be focused on the knowledge the

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visitor could acquire, the science museum professional on what the visitor would experience. Both ingredients are essential. Of course, there are individuals in both communities who combine both viewpoints, which is desirable. In any event, successful collaboration requires a mutual understanding of differing orientations that generally exist within the two communities. In the following chapters, we try to explain in jargon-free fashion what these two fields are like and how the individuals in them go about their work. The aim here is to explain to the civil engineers some facts about science museums they should keep in mind in trying to collaborate with that type of institution. Likewise, we provide information about civil engineering to the science museum professional. “Science literacy” and “technological literacy” are common goals in informal (non-classroom) science education, which we discuss later, and our particular goal here might be called “bilingual science education literacy” with respect to the vocabularies and professional backgrounds of our two audiences.

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Chapter 2 Understanding Civil Engineering Engineering is a broad term that includes many disciplines, all of which have in common the application of science for practical purposes. “Applied science” is approximately equivalent with “engineering.” While people have built many things that today are within the scope of civil engineering – buildings, dams, canals, roads, bridges – it is the scientific aspect to the design and building of such construction that defines modern civil engineering. For the science museum professional without a background in civil engineering, a basic knowledge of what the field consists of can open the door to insights about innovative exhibits, important themes to communicate to their audiences, and opportunities for collaboration.

Historical Background Why is it called “civil” engineering? Originally, the term civil engineering was introduced to distinguish it from “military” engineering. Military engineering, dating back many centuries, was devoted to such kinds of construction as castle walls, fortress towers, defensive canals and moats, and siege equipment. The term civil engineering was needed as the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution matured, and as people who came to be known as civil engineers had full-time careers using applied science to design the construction that the public used in daily life. Things like a huge lighthouse tower built at Alexandria over two thousand years ago, or suspension bridges in China a thousand years ago, might be called “civil engineering works,” but they were not the result of what we call “civil engineering” today, which only materialized when physics and mathematics rapidly grew in the last few centuries. In the next chapter we will see that the modern science museum also had ancient origins, and that like civil engineering, its rapid development only began in the eighteenth century. The parallel timeline of the development of civil engineering has similar milestones with the science museum – ancient origins, but only as of the 1700s and 1800s did it develop into a form recognizably similar with the field and profession of today. Some of the mathematical basis of civil engineering dates back at least to ancient Greek times. The lever principle, for example, which Archimedes (287-212 BC) understood and described, is still extensively used in civil engineering calculations. It was not till Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), however, that several of the features of modern engineering and science began to become well formed, such as the idea that the best test of a proposition or concept was an experiment. (Today we say “put the idea to the test.” Galileo used the term cimento, or ordeal, in other words to “put the idea through the ordeal of the test.”) Many of the science learning goals one finds in state science education standards today reflect a view of the world that only dates from the time of Galileo. By chance, the same year Galileo died, Isaac Newton was born. Newton (1642-1727) was to greatly advance fields in what is now known as physics from the level they were in as of the time of Galileo. Principles first

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mathematically described by Newton, such as the action of forces, gravity, or inertia, are still used extensively in civil engineering today. The story of modern civil engineering begins to move quickly following the era of Newton. In countries such as France and Britain, people combined a practical knowledge of materials and construction with the mathematics and science that were then available. Combined with the great economic pull of the Industrial Revolution, people started to specialize in civil engineering. For example, the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (school of bridges and roads) was established by the French government in Paris in 1747. The Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées was to be the intellectual and professional home of many of the leading names in the young field of civil engineering, such as Claude-Louis Navier (1785-1836). Structural engineers still are guided by Navier’s Theorem, and engineers working with water systems are familiar with the Navier-Stokes equations. John Smeaton (1724-1792), who gained his first engineering experience in the design of wind and water mills in England, was one of the first to use the English term “ civil engineer.” He was put in charge of the design and construction of Eddystone Lighthouse, one of the first structures in the modern era to use concrete and advance that material beyond its early usage in Roman construction. Today, concrete is essential to almost all civil engineering projects. He was central to the founding of the Society of Civil Engineers in 1771. The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, which remains an active professional organization in the United Kingdom to this day. It was founded in a coffee house – quite an influential institution in history. For example, one of the first insurance enterprises, Lloyd’s of London, was founded in 1688 in such a place, namely Edward Lloyd’s coffee house. Known as “penny universities” for their price of admission and the abundance of publications and open discussion available, coffee houses continue to be “informal learning” centers today. Thomas Telford (1757-1834), a Scottish engineer, was one of the first presidents of ICE. His career included record-setting bridges, roads, and canals. As the young United States grew rapidly in the 1800s, civil engineering became a growth industry, although university-trained engineers were not common till after the Civil War. One of the fortes of American civil engineering as compared to European turned out to be the suspension bridge, with important early developments in that structural form made by James Finley (1762-1828), Charles Ellet (1810-1862), and John August Roebling (1806-1869). As of the latter half of the 1900s, civil engineering becomes recognizably similar to today’s profession. At the same time, science museums begin to take on their modern form. The nature of the civil engineering profession in academia, government, and practice, and its demographic aspects, are discussed in Chapter 5.

Civil Engineering Disciplines Civil engineers conceptualize, design, construct, and maintain the complex infrastructure that any society relies on to support its needs, ranging from the indispensable, such as shelter and water, to comforts such as entertainment facilities. In ancient times construction projects included pyramids, aqueducts, and amphitheaters. Today, they include churches, mosques, or temples of great size; airports and subway systems; electrical generation plants with hydo, wind, solar, fossil fuel, or nuclear power sources; and roller coasters, ski lifts, theaters, and

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sports arenas. The Ferris Wheel, for example, was invented for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair by civil engineer George Ferris. In the future, civil engineers may be called upon to build structures in space or on the moon. Civil engineers also work to protect the environment we live in so that it remains clean and safe. Civil engineers are engaged in projects related to preventing erosion, air pollution, and contamination of underground or surface water, as well as minimizing solid waste. The construction of complex water systems in the USA and other developed countries has ensured that most water is free from bacteria and water-borne diseases, a significant factor in the health and longevity of our population today, which was one of the great challenges of civil engineering of a century ago. In fact, a “developed” country is partly defined by the fact that it has extensively applied modern civil engineering, along with communications and electronic engineering and other science and technology disciplines. Civil engineering has played an important role in history by fundamentally changing the ways in which people live, work, and travel. Well-known examples of notable civil engineering projects that have had a significant impact on the United States include: the Erie Canal; major bridges, some of which have achieved the status of cultural symbols, such as the Brooklyn Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge; the first skyscraper buildings, for example the Reliance Building by Daniel H. Burnham (Figure 2-1); the transcontinental railroad; aqueducts that bring water to such major cities as New York City or Los Angeles from sources hundreds of miles away; a widespread system of dams and levees controlling the flow of the Mississippi River; Hoover Dam; the Alaska Pipeline. In other parts of the world, civil engineering monuments of significance in history include the Eiffel Tower in Paris (named after civil engineer Auguste Eiffel), the Panama Canal extending across Panama; the Zuiderworks that controls the flow of water in the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands for flood control and land reclamation purposes, and the “Chunnel” rail tunnel between the United Kingdom and France. Supporting a healthy and productive society requires development of a complex infrastructure based on the fundamentals of mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and economics. Therefore, civil engineers, who apply these sciences to their profession, require expertise in a broad range of subjects. They major as undergraduates in college in a department of civil engineering (often called Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) with a broad range of required courses, and with a modest emphasis in a sub-discipline such as geotechnical or structural engineering. The master’s degree is commonly obtained by civil engineers today to better prepare them for their careers, and in graduate school the

Figure 2-1. The Reliance Building, Chicago, Illinois, one of the first true skyscrapers. It had a complete steel-frame (rather than brick bearing walls) and extensively glazed exterior.

photo: RR

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specialization is much greater: A graduate student in civil engineering may specialize in structural or geotechnical engineering, for example, or in water resources or transportation engineering. The student receiving a doctoral degree (PhD or the equivalent DSc degree) specializes even more. Several or all of the following civil and environmental sub-disciplines may collaborate to complete the various stages of any given project. The constituent disciplines, or sub-disciplines, of civil engineering, include: construction engineering environmental engineering geotechnical engineering structural engineering transportation engineering water resources engineering

Construction Engineering A construction engineer manages a project to bring the design to completion within budget and on time. The designer typically provides drawings, calculations, and specifications that the construction engineer follows to build the project. Typically a construction engineer would be responsible for the following. Planning: surveying, site layout, scheduling of tasks, equipment selection Management: hiring and managing subcontractors and crews, managing materials and

logistics, drafting and reviewing contracts, ensuring safety, document control Finance: estimating costs, preparing bids, controlling budgets Quality control: checking plans and specifications for constructability, onsite material

testing, implementing environmental safeguards Engineering: design of temporary structures, analyzing and designing solutions for

unexpected construction problems. Figure 2-2 illustrates how construction engineering must be considered at the outset of a design project. Not only must the design perform efficiently once completed, it must also be put together in an efficient process. This particular bridge construction example, where two self-supporting cantilever “arms” reached out from opposite sides of the canyon to join in the middle, could also be taken as an analogy for engineering-science museum collaboration: Each party must be self-supporting so they can reach out and join up halfway. Figure 2-3 shows an unfamiliar view of the Eiffel Tower – during construction, when its metal framework was supported by timber supports. Gustave Eiffel had to not only consider gravity and wind forces on the tower once it was completed, but also how to erect it, one small piece of wrought iron at a time.

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completion segment being poured

Figure 2-2. Devil’s Slide Bridge, California. The bridge was constructed by extending from each of the sides of the canyon a self-supporting cantilever arm. At center is formwork around concrete being poured to complete the central segment that joins into one structure what were two spans during construction. The technique avoided the need to build temporary supports under the bridge as it was built.

photo: RR

Figure 2-3. Gustave Eiffel’s iron tower was supported by a forest of timber shoring as it ascended to its 300-meter (1000 foot) height.

photo: Bibliotheque National

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Environmental Engineering Environmental engineers work to sustain a healthy environment for humans, wildlife, and other living organisms, study the release of pollutants, clean up contaminated sites, develop and enforce regulations. In one sense, human intervention in the environment has largely come from civil engineering development– the expansion of cities, building ports, etc. - which has often brought along negative environmental impacts that are now being reduced (“mitigated”). Environmental engineers, along with water system engineers as discussed later, also work in the field of sanitary engineering, which includes solid waste disposal landfill sites as well as sewage systems. An environmental engineer might be responsible for tasks such as the following. Assessment: evaluating the impact of a project on the surrounding environment,

including air, water, noise, soil, biotic community, and social impacts Design: designing water treatment, wastewater treatment, recycling, land fill, and

pollution monitoring and controlling facilities Analysis: analyzing pollution types and levels, modeling the movement and

dispersion of contaminants in the air, water, and soil Monitoring and Compliance: monitoring levels of contaminants in the environment;

enforcing environmental protection regulations Mitigation: cleaning up polluted sites, developing processes to minimize release of

pollutants, disposal of hazardous waste, and conservation of resources. Figure 2-4 illustrates an environmental engineering facility serving a practical purpose and which is also a popular visitor center and museum. The Musée des Egouts (museum of sewers) can be visited by purchasing a group pass to art and other museums in Paris. For a century, it has provided tours of its underground works that carry storm water and sewage beneath the streets of the city.

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Figure 2-4. Musée des Egouts. The museum of the sewer system of Paris is a frequented tourist destination and has provided tours for visitors for a century. A: The visitor not only learns about the infrastructure under the streets of Paris that carries and treats the sewage and stormwater of the urban region – one descends from the sidewalk by the River Seine down into this working civil and environmental engineering system. B: Display boards explain the growth of Paris from Roman times to the present, along with the need for a growing sewer system. Civil engineers such as Eugène Belgrand and their innovations in hydraulic engineering are featured. C: A diagram explains how a large sphere introduced into a sewer main restricts the flow of water, making it speed up and scour out sand and debris. D: An example of such a sphere, made of laminated wood.

photo: RR

D

A

B

C

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Illustrated in Figure 2-5 is an environmental engineering laboratory where the flow of water (a hydraulic engineering topic) has been physically modeled, so that impacts such as dredging in the San Francisco Bay, or piping and diversion of freshwater from its natural course for use by agriculture or cities, can be predicted via physical simulations.

Geotechnical Engineering Our infrastructure is built either on or below ground, and may even be made of earth materials (for example earth dams or levees). Geotechnical engineers characterize the properties of earth materials and analyze soil and soil-structure systems to optimize their performance for anticipated loads. See Figure 2-6 for the geotechnical engineer’s viewpoint. Often it is said that there are four basic structural materials: wood, metal (chiefly steel), masonry (e.g., brick, concrete block), and concrete. Actually, all construction built here on Earth includes a fifth basic structural material – the earth beneath or around the building or other construction. Geotechnical engineers work closely with geologists to gather information about subsurface characteristics and with structural engineers to design the foundation for the overlying structure. A geotechnical engineer might be concerned with such activities as: Assessment: evaluating sites for constructability and risks, such as stability failures

(e.g., landslides) or deformations (soft soil that excessively compacts) Analysis: modeling response of soil and soil-structure systems to future loads, e.g.,

earthquakes, and/or changes in environmental conditions, e.g., change in the level of the water table (soil properties are often sensitive to water content)

Design: design of geotechnical systems to meet performance criteria; examples of geotechnical systems include foundation systems, retaining structures, pavement, tunnels, and earthworks such as dams, levees, landfills, and filled ground where construction will be built

Monitoring: monitoring earthwork and foundation construction to verify analysis assumptions and quality control in the construction process

Mitigation: stabilizing slopes and excavations, installing barriers to inhibit the movement of subsurface contaminants.

A

B

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D

Figure 2-5. The US Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model Visitor Center, Sausalito, California. It was built for hydraulic modeling of the flow of water from the interior 40% of California into San Francisco Bay, around the Bay, and out the Golden Gate. The model can also simulate the rise and fall of tides. Exhibits inform the visitors about the model and the water system it has studied.

photo: RR

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Geotechnical engineering has become an increasingly sophisticated field in recent years. (“Soil engineering” is what the field was usually called until a few decades ago). In the application shown in Figure 2-7, geotechnical engineering, in combination with the use of modern instruments and communication technology, is used to contend with the hazard of landslides. On this narrow ledge along the Pacific Ocean, where the roadbed has several times fallen down the cliff because of landslides, wires are embedded across the road to measure a fraction of an inch of extension if the road begins to stretch and slide toward the downhill side. Illuminated lights and a sign are then activated to warn drivers. A cell phone call is also automatically generated to notify state highway engineers.

Figure 2-6. The geotechnical engineer’s viewpoint. Geotechnical engineers look at a building site differently than the way we usually do, because most of us only visualize a building or other construction from the ground up. Geotechnical engineers study and field-measure the properties of the soil and rock layers beneath and around construction so that foundations, drainage, and underground construction such as pipelines, can be properly designed and constructed.

illustration: RR

Figure 2-7. Geotechnical monitoring of landslide hazard, Highway 1, Devil’s Slide, California.photo: RR

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Structural Engineering Structural engineers design structural systems to support and resist various natural forces that may originate in nature (e.g., the wind) or may be applied by human activity, e.g., the outward force (centrifugal force) exerted on a curving railroad bridge as the moving mass of a train passes by). See Figures 2.8, 2.9, 2.10. Structural engineers must consider the properties and behavior of materials, e.g. steel, concrete, aluminum, timber, plastic, and innovative building materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic; anticipated loads, e.g. structural weight, contents weight, wind, earthquake, flood, snow, and blast; economics; constructability; occupant comfort; and most of all safety.

Structural engineers work closely with architects to develop the structural systems of buildings to support the architect’s conceptual design. Structural engineers perform the following functions: Design: design of structural systems to meet performance criteria; examples of

structural systems include bridges, buildings, towers, offshore platforms, stadiums, piers, dams, retaining walls; some structural engineers work on the designs of automobiles, airplanes, and even amusement rides

Analysis: using mathematical models and computer simulations to evaluate potential response of a structure and support design decisions

Monitoring: monitoring construction to verify analysis assumptions and quality control in the construction process

Mitigation: developing solutions to strengthen existing buildings.

Figure 2-8. (Left) University students’ model of a seismically braced building about to be tested on a small shake table at the national conference held on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Models built by university engineering students competed in a contest sponsored by the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. (Right) an actual building with retrofit seismic bracing at the University of Tokyo.

photo: RR

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Figure 2-9. Széchenyi Bridge, Budapest. Structural engineers, such as William Tierney Clark (1783-1852), who designed this bridge across the Danube to connect the cities of Buda and Pest, which helped to create the modern city of Budapest, have had a great impact on economies and daily life. At right is a view of the individual iron bars bolted together to form continuous chains for this suspension bridge.

photo: RR

Figure 2-10. Brooklyn Bridge, New York. Designed by structural engineer and construction contractor John Roebling, this bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River was completed in 1883. Steel wires (inside the four pipe-like enclosures visible here) rather than iron chains were used, as engineering and technology had progressed since the Budapest bridge was built.

photo: RR

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Figure 2-11. San Francisco International Airport. A modern transportation facility such as an airport often consists of several integrated kinds of transportation systems. Shown here is a complex set of freeway and street linkages requiring numerous bridges, a mass transit rail line, parking and rental car facilities, as well as the obvious central feature of the airport, namely the runways, taxiways, and facilities for the airplanes.

photo: RR

Transportation Engineering Transportation engineers plan, design, analyze, operate, and maintain transportation systems to ensure the safe and efficient movement of people and goods. They must consider land use, economics, the environment, and social impacts as well as engineering constraints as they design these systems. Transportation engineers work closely with urban planners in the development of new communities or the design of urban renewal projects. Typically a transportation engineer might be involved in: Planning: forecasting transportation demand; defining goals, constraints, and

alternatives for transportation systems and services Design: design of transportation systems to meet performance criteria; examples of

transportation systems include highways, railways, airports, ports, urban and suburban road networks, state and interstate highways, parking lots, traffic control signal systems, and mass transit systems

Analysis: collecting data on current traffic and trends, modeling transportation systems to evaluate expected performance, cost–benefit and lifecycle cost analysis

Operations and Monitoring: monitoring construction to verify analysis assumptions and quality control in the construction process, monitoring system performance such as traffic flow or accident rate, maintaining full operability of systems, for example traffic control systems of street intersections or railroad crossings, so that they remain safe and efficient.

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Water Resources Engineering Water resources engineers deal with issues concerning the quality and quantity of water. In former decades, the environmental impacts of providing water supplies to cities and agriculture, controlling floods with dams and levees, or draining swamps (wetlands), were of lesser concern to society than today. Now, negative impacts are a major aspect of water resources engineering. Communities use water for agriculture, industry, recreation, households, and maintaining a healthy natural environment. Typical responsibilities of a water resources engineer include: Design: design of flood control systems and modulation of water flow in rivers, beach

protection measures, hydropower generation facilities, and water supply systems for households, industry, and agriculture

Analysis: modeling the movement and dispersion of contaminants in surface water and groundwater, using mathematical models and computer simulations to evaluate alternatives, cost–benefit and lifecycle cost analysis

Monitoring: monitoring river flow, sediments, lake and reservoir levels, snow pack, precipitation, runoff, weather, and climate

Mitigation: maintaining, repairing, and upgrading infrastructure; developing solutions to recover from aftereffects of flood; water conservation.

Figure 2-13 illustrates both ancient and modern examples of components of water supply systems. The way people have obtained and used water has been a major influence on entire nations throughout history. The historical aspect of civil engineering is one of the themes that science museums can present to their visitors, as well as current technical and research aspects.

Figure 2-12. Metro subway station, Washington, DC. A subway system requires engineering to plan the routes, design excavation and tunneling, and supervise the construction of stations (each of which must have their own “transportation systems,” namely escalators and elevators that may extend several stories to the above-ground level).

photo: RR

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Types of Employment As of 2006 there were about 250,000 civil engineers in the workforce (BLS, 2008). Of those, 65% to 75% worked in private practice, 24% to 34% in government, and 1% in academia. Many private consultants do contract work for government agencies, making the line between government and private employment a bit fuzzy. The large percentage of civil engineers working in the government sector distinguishes civil engineering from other engineering disciplines. For example, only about 5% of electrical engineers and less than 1% of industrial engineers work in the government sector (BLS, 2008). Private sector employers range from large multi-national corporations such as Bechtel with more than 42,000 employees, to small design or consulting practices with one to 10 employees. Employers include private utilities with their own civil engineering departments, or design firms providing consulting services. Private firms provide services in all of the areas discussed above. Employees include designers, analysts, planners, operations managers, materials testers, and researchers. Job responsibilities vary considerably. Entry-level civil engineers working for a land development company might spend much of their time interacting with computerized drafting and geographic information systems. A senior

Figure 2-13: (Left) Pont du Gard aqueduct, France, constructed 2,000 years ago by the Romans to carry water across a valley. The three levels of arches hold up a water trough at the very top. (Above) manhole cover providing access to a cistern (water tank) under an intersection of San Francisco streets. The large size of the cylindrical tank is seen from its brick outline. For drinking water, wastewater plumbing, fire fighting, agriculture, and other uses, the provision of water has always been a critical need.

photo: RR

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partner in the same firm would be interfacing with clients and city planners. Employees of a construction management company would spend much of their time in the field at the construction site. Government-employed civil engineers work for federal, state, and local governments, municipalities, towns, townships, and counties, school districts, and special districts. At the federal level, a civil engineer might be employed by the Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations related to grading and erosion, or by the Army Corps of Engineers to design and manage flood control projects. At the state level many civil engineers work for transportation or regulatory agencies. Examples of regulatory agencies are the Air Resources Board of a state or regional agency, the Office of Public Safety, or the Department of Health and the Environment (or agencies with similar names). At the local level, civil engineers tend to work in departments that are involved in planning and community development, as well as in public works departments that manage streets and some pipelines, or agencies that operate utilities or waste facilities such as recycling centers and landfills. Academics work mostly in four-year colleges and in universities offering the master’s and doctoral degrees, but some are faculty in community colleges. Civil engineering, and other engineering disciplines, are only rarely offered in high schools or lower grade levels at the present time. In addition to teaching courses, academics collaborate with students and industry partners on basic and applied research projects. Projects might range from developing a new type of material for green building construction to testing a utility’s electrical equipment for seismic resistance.

Civil Engineering: Academia and Research One of the promising areas of civil engineering for interaction with a science museum is in the realm of academia and research. While funds are always limited, the guarantied salaries of university professors sometimes allow them to donate their expertise for public purposes, and in some cases they receive credit for such public service. The consulting engineering firm, by contrast, receives income in proportion to how much billable work it produces, and career advancement is mostly based on what the engineer can do for the firm. Assistant professors, who have not yet attained tenure, are primarily evaluated on the quality and quantity of their research, especially as measured by publications in peer-reviewed journals, and for their teaching, while broader public service is given a lower priority in most universities. Thus, sometimes a tenured professor (associate or full professor) is more likely to be able to extensively collaborate with a museum. Research grants often allow a modest budget for public education and outreach (typically 5% to 10% of the total budget on larger projects), and in some cases funding agencies and organizations require such education and outreach efforts.

For the university civil engineering professor, there are several points to keep in mind in considering how one’s research and educational work may or may not fit well with a given science museum’s program. One important consideration is the age level and educational

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background of the intended audience. In many cases, an age level of approximately ten years old may be a primary target audience for a museum. In an unstructured setting of learning, a museum often seeks to ensure accessibility for visitors of a variety of educational backgrounds, whereas in academia, the students may be expected to all have certain prerequisites. In the university setting, lectures are common. In the museum, lectures are not the primary form of learning. In the university, students have signed up for classes and can be expected to have an initial interest in the subject, or need to acquire the mastery of the subject and course credit for advancement. In the museum, visitors have no such pre-existing commitment to learning about a particular topic: They are pulled to an exhibit or other activity because it is interesting, not pushed because it is part of a curriculum.

Some universities have resources for faculty to assist them in designing education and outreach components of research projects. A school of education at a university is a likely source of such expertise. In some cases, a graduate student working under an education professor has provided the evaluation component of a museum project. (Evaluation is discussed in Chapter 3). Some universities have dedicated education and outreach staff who may have existing contacts with the region’s science museums. To name one example, the University of Nevada at Reno has a Raggio Research Center for STEM Education. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, the subject matter of the NSF program on informal science education. Engineering organizations in a region may have pre-existing contacts as well, and may have public education programs that might be expanded upon.

A given research solicitation to which a faculty member is responding may list a number of audiences that are desirable to reach with education and outreach efforts, such as young children, Kindergarten-through-grade-12 (K-12), older adults, or particular ethnic, racial, or gender groups. It may be tempting for the professor to think that a science museum can provide “one-stop shopping” to reach all of these intended audiences, but it may be necessary to have a more focused effort. Budgets seldom go as far as one initially hoped, and they need to be prioritized for a project to successfully reach its audience or audiences.

Civil Engineering Practice Engineers in professional practice bring their own perspectives to the civil engineering subject, and they can play a valuable role in collaborations with science museums. A child typically has early experiences with professionals such as doctors, teachers, dentists, and optometrists, and has an idea as to what bus drivers, shopkeepers, and fire fighters do. Later in life, many people also gain a personal acquaintance with the work of lawyers and accountants, contractors and gardeners, or perhaps retain an architect to design a house. By contrast, most people have had no personal interaction with civil engineers. Thus, it requires some effort to present what the profession is and how it is practiced. The engineering thought process can be the basis for familiarizing the public with the work of practicing civil engineers. For example, a typical iterative engineering process proceeds from schematic design to initial analysis, then back to refinement of design and further

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analysis. At a simple level, this process could be mimicked by having a teenager in a museum make a guess as to how far to move two objects of different weight on the two sides of a teeter-totter so that the lever balances, or in essence to conduct a preliminary design. If the visitor is old enough, they could use simple algebra, to make the product of the weight-and-distance-from-fulcrum on one side equal the comparable product on the other side. This parallels the way engineers use math to predict results. Experimentation (pulling a pin to let the lever rotate freely) can be observed to see what happens, resulting in a refinement of the design (placement of weights) and re-calculation to get a better result. The way this thought process is similar to the method used by engineers at a more advanced level in professional practice can thus be conveyed without extensive text or lecture content, simply by hands-on inquiry. The idea that mathematics and engineering can predict the physical world can be an exciting and novel idea to someone who comes upon the concept for the first time. With engineering knowledge, it is possible to make a calculation and then see via experiment that the analysis was able to accurately divine the result. This learning experience of how engineering analysis can predict the behavior of a real structure, the actual ground, or the fluids swirling in a river, can be especially vivid when the result of inaccurate analysis is quite graphic. For example, a model of a beam may break; a tower may tip and overturn because the simulated soil under it is firm on one side and soft on the other; or as the side walls of a model of a river are moved farther apart, causing the water to slow down and drop sediment, the waterway clogs up and makes toy boats run aground. Engineers learn from failures – though hopefully any significant failures are rare! – and “junior engineers” can similarly learn in the laboratory of the museum. Design, analysis, and construction services of the civil engineer may be performed in the private sector by civil engineering firms, or sometimes by firms that combine civil engineering with construction contracting or with architecture. Similar practice occurs in some government agencies that design their own facilities rather than retain the services of consulting firms. For example, a highway department may design some bridges with its own staff, and a local government public works agency may design its jurisdiction’s roads or water drainage systems. In addition, some government agencies have a regulatory rather than design responsibility. The most common example is the local government building department (sometimes called a Department of Building and Safety or Department of Building Inspection). Drawings and verbal documentation called specifications are submitted to the local building department for its review. Regulations in a legally adopted building code are compared with the features of the design, to verify that foundations are adequate, materials have any required fire resistance qualities, the roof is sufficiently wind resistant, handrails and guardrails are the proper height, posts and beams are adequately strong, and so on. Following this verification, a building permit is issued. Then, during the construction process, building inspectors visit construction sites and verify that the work is proceeding according to the permit. Thus, in addition to private sector or public sector civil engineers involved with design work, government agency civil engineer regulators also offer possibilities for collaboration with science museums to explain how their processes work. To engage the public in simulating the process of building a house, for example, visitors could play the role of building inspectors to see if they can find deficiencies in a construction mock-up.

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Like the designers who work to develop science museum exhibits, civil engineering designers face many challenges, including funding, permits and regulations, and differences of opinion on the priority of the project or particular characteristics such as aesthetics. An example of a major, multi-billion-dollar civil engineering project is the replacement of a portion of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge that carries traffic from the mid-bay island, Yerba Buena Island, to Oakland. That eastern part of the Bridge was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, even though the earthquake was centered over 60 miles (100 kilometers) away. A repair completed within about a month restored the bridge to traffic, but policy making then revolved around the issue of whether to retrofit the bridge to improve its performance in the next earthquake, or to tear that portion down and build a completely new bridge. Eventually the decision was made to build a new bridge that could not only safely resist an earthquake but also avoid the inconvenience of closure for repair after future earthquakes. Another plus for that decision was that a new bridge would of course last longer. And, from an environmental standpoint, replacement of any of the original foundation piles under the existing bridge to upgrade their strength would also have triggered costly environmental procedures as the mud was disturbed. (The piles were chemically treated timber poles, similar to telephone poles, driven into the soil under the Bay.) That decision to build anew rather than to retrofit the old raised the issue of who would pay for it – federal government grants, which had buy-American contracting requirements that increased the cost of the steel; statewide taxes; local governments in the area; tolls on the motorists. Each alternative had its interest groups aligned in support or opposition. The appearance of the bridge and its precise alignment were also major issues, having to do with the civic egos of the two cities across the bay from each other, Oakland and San Francisco. As of this writing, the replacement bridge is still under construction and is scheduled to open in 2013. In other words, a hazardous major bridge visibly damaged by moderate earthquake motion, and which was predicted to do worse in a closer earthquake, will have been carrying millions of vehicles over it for almost 25 years. This is because of the societal context discussed above, not because it takes 25 years to build a bridge once the decisions are made. By comparison, the entire Bay Bridge, 4.5 miles (7.25 kilometers) long, including several suspension bridge spans, what was the largest bore tunnel in the world through Yerba Buena Island, as well as the eastern portion to be replaced, was completed in half a dozen years in the 1930s. While the generation-long process of building a replacement for the eastern portion of this bridge is an extreme example, it indicates the challenges civil engineers face in their profession today. Their technical work interfaces with the realm of politics, economics, and society in many ways. For some museum visitors, presenting this social context of engineering can be an interesting subject, aside from or in addition to the technical aspects of the discipline.

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Figure 3-1: Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BC), pictured on a bronze coin that was minted in Alexandria during his reign. (His father, Ptolemy I, was one of Alexander the Great’s generals). Ptolemy II established the museum with its library in Alexandria, the capital city of the Ptolemaic Empire. From its Greek name, Mouseion, has come the English word museum.

photo: RR

Chapter 3 Understanding Science Museums “Science museums” as used here includes the more recent term “science centers,” except where there is a need to distinguish between these two types of facilities in a particular context. The term science center generally refers to facilities that present science activities to the public via interactive exhibits. A science center’s exhibits are “hands-on” rather than objects preserved in display cases. The term science center also includes facilities such as zoos and aquariums, which are not usually called “museums.” Many institutions combine the themes of science and engineering, (science and industry, science and technology), which is sometimes reflected in their names; an example is the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. A science “museum” traditionally has the goal of not only presenting science to the public but also fulfilling a research function, such as preserving collections of materials like fossils, minerals, plants, or other items (often called “artifacts” or “objects”). In practice, it is common for one institution to share the above-described characteristics of science museum and science center, regardless of its particular name. Thus, here we use the term “science museum” in its broadest sense to include all of the above. This chapter provides background information to the engineer or someone else outside the field of science museums to encourage more communication between them and the science museum professional.

Historical Background Like civil engineering, museums have ancient antecedents but began to mature and expand in the eighteenth century. One of the most famous and historically important museums of any type or era was built in Alexandria, Egypt, by direction of Ptolemy II (Figure 3-1). It was world-renowned for its famous library, facilities for scholars to work and gather, and

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collections of artifacts brought from around the known Hellenic world. Scientific information was included, though it was not the only subject patronized by the Ptolemaic dynasty at the museum over the following 250 years. That time span can be easily pictured as the dynasty between the deaths of two famous people: Alexander the Great, one of whose generals was Ptolemy I, the founder of the dynasty in Egypt, and Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII), the last of the Ptolemaic rulers. From that legacy in Hellenic time, 2300 years ago, the name of the Ptolemaic museum, the Mouseion has come down to us as the English word “museum.” Many museums, whether they are science museums or museums devoted to other realms, still have many of the characteristics of their namesake. Museums today still serve the ancient purpose of preserving and passing on from one generation to another civilization’s knowledge. The museum of Alexandria, however, did not offer exhibits to the public, which is the hallmark of the modern science museum, which was only to come during the Enlightenment period in Europe. Early forerunners of today’s science museum included personal collections of scientific objects maintained in an individual’s residence, often in cabinets, and the term “cabinets of curiosities” was often used. An example is the extensive natural history collection of the Dutch pharmacist Albertus Seba (1665-1736), and the evolution in the 1700s and 1800s of royal family collections in Europe into national government exhibits open to the public. Using non-precious objects, science museums today sometimes bring “cabinets of curiosities” out onto the museum floor or into a classroom, such as the FOSS kits developed by the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California. Designed for a particular age or grade level, with resources for the teacher included, a kit might be a suitcase-sized container with magnets and electrical items that can be used to learn about electro-magnetism. In many cases, the taxonomy so essential to the work of the professional scientist – categorizing genuses and species of plants or animals, for example -- is at the core of how such early collections came to be organized. How a museum organizes its collections and exhibits them is not a neutral process but one that imparts its own meaning. For example, Boorstin (1985, p. 604-609) tells the fascinating story of how the classification of objects in the Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiquities by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788-1865) led to the now familiar divisions of prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. That Danish royal collection had its beginnings in the acquisition of the private collection of Ole Worm (1588-1665) after his death. Thomsen merely created an orderly classification of the Worm’s cabinet of curiosities of ancient objects and tools into those three categories of materials – stone, iron, and bronze -- and in 1819 put them on exhibit for visitors in three different sets of cabinetry. The exhibit created such a stir among scholars that soon they were using these three categories of pre-history to structure their research. Similarly today, the way an exhibit is divided up or sequenced can impart meaning, even apart from the specific content. Boorstin (1985 p. 604) states that “The eighteenth century in Europe saw a new kind of collection, a novel institution, the public museum. The British government pioneered by

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acquiring the collections of Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, which were opened to the public in 1759. Some private collections, like the Vatican museums, were voluntarily opened to the public. In the United States and wherever there had not been palaces or royal collections, the public had to start from scratch. New World counterparts appeared: Peale’s Museum (1784) in Philadelphia, the Smithsonian Institution (1846) in Washington, and others in South America.” One can observe today that the public entry hall of Thomas Jefferson’s much-visited Monticello was in effect a personally established science museum of exhibits, featuring such American items as elk antlers and Indian artifacts brought back by Lewis and Clark. At the same time, in the 1800s, civil engineering was entering its growth phase. In the twentieth century, the preservation and presentation of actual things or artifacts in science museums has increasingly been accompanied by the educational aim of explaining to the visitor, or allowing the visitor to discover on his or her own, the “how” of an item as well as the “what.” For example, accompanying the display of historic coal mining equipment in the Central Museum of Mining (Központi Bányászati Múzeum) in Sopron, Hungary, are mechanized working models of the equipment. See Figure 3-2. As the gears on a scale model turn, conveyor belts move, and drills turn, the visitor can see and understand how the process works, as well as see related full-size artifacts. Without the working model, the full-size equipment would be hard to visualize in action. Especially with regard to civil engineering artifacts, the real items are sometimes too large to be housed within a science museum building, and thus scale models are useful for explaining how something functions.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich, founded in 1903, is often credited with being the first of the modern science museums. It is still a leader in the field, being one of the largest museums of science and technology in the world. Of particular relevance to our subject here, it was founded by the Association of German Engineers – whereas many other science museums had core supporters from the natural sciences and little involvement of engineers. The Deutsches Museum includes exhibits in many different engineering disciplines – aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, mining, industrial -- as well as civil engineering. Civil engineers generally need to aim to introduce only a narrow slice of their discipline into a museum’s portfolio, but this narrow slice can still be influential.

Figure 3-2. Working model of water-powered ore pulverizer, Central Museum of Mining (Központi Bányászati Múzeum), Sopron, Hungary. Rotation of the water wheel at left turns the connected horizontal cam shaft, which raises heavy vertical hammers and then allows them to fall on the ore below. The visitor understands the process by seeing the model in operation, without the need for explanatory poster text.

photo: RR

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Science Centers As explained earlier, frequently there is a combination of “science museum” traits (e.g., having a research function or permanent collection) and “science center” traits (hands-on exhibits). Here we focus on the characteristics of the science center. The Exploratorium in San Francisco, founded by physicist Frank Oppenheimer (1912-1985) in 1969, is one of the leaders in development of this type of facility, along with the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. (See Figure 3-3.) Frank was the brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, of atomic bomb fame. Frank also worked on the Manhattan Project. As a physics professor at the University of Colorado, he developed what he called a Library of Experiments for college students, and at the Exploratorium he wanted the broad public audience to be able to conduct their own experiments with exhibits. Thus, the Exploratorium’s exhibits have tended to be controllable by the individual (“hands-on”), and also have a range of behavior depending on the actions and decisions of the visitor (“interactive.”) Though there were earlier “hands-on” types of exhibits, such as at the Deutsches Museum, the Exploratorium is a key example of the modern science center devoted to that concept. In what in retrospect is a historic manifesto of the science center concept, Oppenheimer (1968) stated the “science museum and exploration center” should be “entertaining,” “aesthetic,” “refreshing,” and “stimulating.” Biologists use the term “type species” when defining a genus in terms of the characteristics of one key species. In that sense, the Exploratorium might be considered the type species of the genus called the science center.

The Association of Science-Technology Centers is a large international association of science centers and museums. Its name can be confusing to the scientist or engineer, who is familiar with “science and technology centers” of a quite different type. “Science center” or “science and technology center” are terms in the research field that have often been used to name a large research program involving multiple universities or research institutes, not to refer to hands-on science museums. Beginning in the 1980s, the National Science Foundation has funded over 40 multi-million-dollar centers within its Science and Technology Centers program (NSF 2003). As of 2008, 17 such centers are active. Center

Figure 3-3. An exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium allows the visitor to change the position of masses on several pendulums to understand the effect on their movement. “Hands-on” usually literally means that the visitor’s hands touch the exhibit and operate it, but it can also refer to other interactions, such as when a visitor makes a sound that interacts with an exhibit.

photo: RR

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for Advanced Optics: A National Science and Technology Center, the name of one such advanced and sophisticated research program, with a budget of about $4 million per year, is an example that illustrates how the terminology in the research domain means something quite distinct from a hands-on science education facility or science museum. In this publication, we generally use the traditional term “science museum” rather than the terms “science center” or “science and technology center” to further this publication’s prime goal, namely the increase of communication and collaboration among people of varied backgrounds.

Combining Engineering With Art In some cases, when the aesthetic qualities of science are emphasized, or when the beautiful aspects of engineering are presented, the science or engineering exhibit may be housed in an art museum rather than science museum. For example, Professor David Billington of Princeton University, a structural engineering professor in a department of civil engineering, developed with his students an exhibit of meticulously made models of beautiful engineering works. The exhibit had its home in the university’s art museum, not in a civil engineering building on the campus. See Figure 3-4. The exhibit was intentionally designed to be suitable as a traveling exhibit for art museums, as its title indicates: “The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy.” (Billington, 2003) This example shows that rigidly categorizing an exhibit into only one discipline may not be useful, and it also illustrates the diversity of civil engineering exhibits and their venues.

Another example of the marriage of art and engineering, with the venue again being the art museum rather than the engineering or science museum, was the Art for Science’s Sake exhibit and engineer-artist collaborative effort between the NSF-funded Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering at Caltech and the Art Center College of Design. See Figure 3-5. (In neuromorphic systems engineering, the engineer designs devices that can move and change shape via sensing and feedback processes similarly to the way a person or other organism uses its nervous system.) As the title of the program and exhibit indicate, the goal was to “to capitalize on the collaborative relationships among artists and scientists to

Figure 3-4. Carefully crafted scale models of bridges on exhibit in an art museum. At left is the George Washington Bridge, a suspension bridge modeled in mixed metal and plastic materials. At right, the model of the arched Bayonne Bridge, made of brass. Both bridges were designed by civil engineer O.H. Ammann, both are in New York City, and both were the longest bridges of their types in the world when they were opened.

photo: “The Art of Structural Design”(Billington, 2003)

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Figure 3-5. Art for Science’s Sake, a collaboration between the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering at Caltech and the Art Center College of Design

photo: Stephen Nowlin, Art Center College of Design

increase the public’s awareness and understanding of science.” (Andrews 2003) In this example, the type of museum that provided a way for engineer to outreach to the public was an art museum, not a science museum. Engineers seeking to present their work to the public might consider collaborations with institutions other than science museums. Richards (2002) discusses several ways that art, and artistic ways of thinking, can be integrated into science museums.

Many American universities have on their campuses what appear to be modern art sculptures, but which are in fact teaching tools for civil engineering students. Here again, the dividing line becomes blurred between science (or applied science, i.e. engineering), on the one hand, and a different area of human inquiry and appreciation, art, on the other. One of the lessons of the AISC Steel Sculpture (Figure 3-5) is that people can be attracted to an engineering-based image or object, such as this very rationalized engineering design that illustrates the structural engineer’s vocabulary of steel connections. The rationality of the piece, which on first glance seems irrational, can be an extra appeal, as compared to a steel sculpture that was motivated only by the personal creativity or whimsy of an artist who had no science and engineering background. The passerby is offered an additional level of experience when they

Ken Goldberg, Pietro Perona Infiltrate, 2003 Fish tank, koi, tracking cameras, projector, computers, custom software. Viewers perceived the fish from their normal perspective of the outside looking in, while tracking and rendering software. synthesized a projected image from the point of view of the tank's only orange fish – a view from the inside looking out. Infiltrate presented a metaphor for transcending boundaries of difference.

Jennifer Steinkamp “Einstein’s Dilemma,” 2003 Projectors, motion sensors, computers “Einstein’s Dilemma” addresses the powerful impact science has on society. Installed in Caltech’s Athenaeum, visual explosions were triggered by sensors as people walk through the space.

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see that the AISC Steel Sculpture is a combination of an interesting modern art appearance with the technical logic underlying the work.

In addition to an outdoor location as with the AISC Steel Sculpture, another venue for informal science education other than a science museum may be the lobby of a building. At the National Academy of Engineering office building in Washington, DC. the visitor first notices the fine quality of the architectural floor and wall finishes in the large foyer, then perhaps realizes that the bronze inlay “decorations” carefully inserted into the stonework are in fact icons of science and engineering – such as the formula for Heinsenberg’s uncertainty principle, the elevation (side view) of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the double helix structure of DNA. Artist Larry Kirkland achieved an aesthetic success while providing the visitor some thought-provoking images of science and technology. Why are there pictures of bird heads that look very similar, except that the beaks are different? Oh yes, you might recall, or learn from the visitor guide booklet -- that illustrates how Charles Darwin studied the different beaks of finches and realized they had evolved over time into different species in response to their environment. While many science museum exhibits go out of their way to attract attention, the subtle approach also has its uses.

Figure 3-6. Full-scale model of different types of connections used with various structural steel shapes. The AISC Steel Sculpture, a teaching aid developed by the American Institute of Steel Construction, has been installed on 135 US university campuses as of 2007. Pictured here is the Steel Sculpture at the University at Buffalo.

photo: André Filiatrault

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Informal Science Education Informal science education, or informal science learning, is a term frequently used by science museum professionals. As defined by the National Science Foundation, this refers to learning that is voluntary, self-directed, happens on an individual rather than group basis, and which occurs “through such means as exhibitions, media projects, emerging learning technologies, and educational programs.” Informal learning occurs in “museums, theaters, community centers, in virtual environments and many other settings including outdoor environments….” (NSF 2008) The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA 2008) provides this similar definition:

Informal science education generally refers to programs and experiences developed outside the classroom by institutions and organizations that include: children’s and natural history museums, science-technology centers, planetariums,

zoos and aquaria, botanical gardens and arboreta, parks, nature centers and environmental education centers, and scientific research laboratories

media, involving print, film, broadcast, and electronic forms community-based organizations and projects, including youth organizations and

community outreach services. NSTA has recently published a book on the subject (Yager and Falk, editors, 2007), indicating that while “informal” means in simplest terms “out of the classroom,” with “formal” meaning “in the classroom,” there are in fact many connections between informal and formal learning, between the educational roles of science museums and those of schools. In writing this monograph, we hope that teachers form a third audience, in addition to science museum professionals and civil engineers. The National Science Foundation provided funding in 2007 to establish the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education, which is organized within the Association of Science-Technology Centers. The word “advancement” is a hint that this field is still evolving, and that research is continually seeking to improve it. In one sense, informal science education has existed for a very long time. Even if we restrict the term to the existence of an identified field with museums dedicated to its goals, it is at least “middle aged.” Most people in the field would agree that the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto have helped “brand” the field. And both of these will celebrate their fortieth year in 2009. Forty years ago, there was no Internet, no world wide web, no video or DVDs. Computers were refrigerator-sized or larger, required computer programming training to use, and were not directly accessed by the public. Social movements that have led to the broadening of the informal science education field in demographic terms, such as women’s liberation and civil rights, were only beginning. Educational theory has also changed greatly over that timespan. There has been an increasing emphasis on how people learn, which is a slightly different focus than how teachers teach. Research on how children develop their cognitive, emotional, and social capacities, such as by Jean Piaget (1896-1980), was only in its initial stages of affecting education in the United States forty years ago. We may expect the relatively young field of informal education to continue to develop in the future.

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Whether it be in a building called a science museum or another place such as a visitor center or lobby of a building, or via a mobile exhibit driven to where the visitors can access it, a key element of the informal learning concept is that the visitor self-directs the learning that occurs. For example, the visitor is attracted to one exhibit or another, and different visitors investigate further in different ways. While important roles may be played by museum staff in assisting visitors, the key goal is that the visitor achieve a self-created experience. This is in distinction to the curricular technique of teaching a common body of knowledge to a class of students at the same time, where it may be necessary to literally “keep everyone on the same page.” That formal education technique has its place: Most people can recall that is how they learned geometry or how to play volleyball, or how they performed in a choral group. Informal learning is a different process. The characteristics of informal science education lead naturally to important considerations in any proposed collaboration of engineers and museums. For example, engineering knowledge that is learned in the university classroom is typically acquired in a very structured, sequenced way. In a given week, students hear a particular lecture, read a particular chapter, attend a laboratory session, and complete a homework assignment, all logically related to acquiring a set of building blocks of knowledge by the end of the semester or term. The engineer should note how different this process is from informal science education, with its self-directed, inquiry-based, free-form style of learning. The National Science Foundation has a program committed to informal science education, called Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings. It emphasizes an incremental cycle of steps in which effective practice, whether implemented through an exhibition, program, or other means, is based to the greatest extent possible on prior related work and current research in learning. Evaluation of practice leads to findings that provide insights and questions for educational research. Subsequent research generates new knowledge that in turn will inform the development of improved informal learning experiences. This is intended to mutually reinforce research and practice and lead to innovation. Information about the NSF informal learning program is available in its program solicitation (NSF 2008).

Public Understanding of Research Another theme common in the science museum world is the public understanding of research, and even sometimes the public participation in scientific research. An anthology of chapters on this theme is presented in Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research. (Chittenden, Farmelo, and Lewenstein, 2004). The goal of public understanding of research exhibits and other offerings is to encourage the visitor to learn as much about the process of research as the results of the research. Thus, the visitor learns how the researcher formulated methods to test a hypothesis or gather data in addition to finding out what the researcher discovered. While not always feasible, the actual involvement of the public in research is one of the more intense ways to accomplish public understanding of research. This active involvement is sometimes called citizen science (and the researcher may be called a civic scientist). For many years, Cornell University has mobilized the public as volunteer collectors of

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ornithological data. Currently, via an “eBird” web-based system, observers can log in their observations of bird species where they live, contributing to a collection of data that spans the Western Hemisphere. Increasingly, science museums have tackled controversial subjects to engage visitors in learning about and forming their own opinions on issues of the day. Examples include exhibits with opportunities for visitors to express their views on genetically modified food, global warming, outbreaks of epidemics, and explicit plasticized human corpses. The controversial aspect of such exhibits has its obvious disadvantage, namely that the controversy may be too disturbing for some visitors or it may obscure the underlying science. But there are two big advantages as well. First, controversies are interesting; they are ways to draw in the visitor. Second, in a democratic society, ordinary citizens and their levels of understanding and opinions are an important foundation of public policy. Thus, just as we expect the population to learn to read and achieve literacy, we also seek the goal of “science literacy.” In the case of civil engineering, controversies often surround large construction projects, providing an entrée for letting the visitor learn about various costs and benefits of the construction. Civil engineering is a primary theme with respect to concerns over the impact of humans on the environment, global warming, pollution, and reduction of natural habitat. Many people in the civil engineering field in the future will probably devote their careers to topics such as energy and material conservation in the construction process and in operation of buildings and infrastructure. An obvious engineering-related aspect of energy-efficient design relates to insulation and thermal storage properties of materials and products. There are also more subtle ways in which engineers are involved in green construction. At present, for example there are many structural engineers who not only are concerned with analysis of loads and forces but also LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) calculations. For example, a structural engineer not only does computations of the required strength of concrete to be used in a building but also its environmental impact. Re-cycled ingredients can be used in the concrete mix, such as fly ash, formerly considered merely a pollutant produced by coal-burning power plants, and pulverized concrete from demolition sites can be re-used in mixing new concrete batches. Civil engineering can also be a background or secondary theme in an exhibit that is primarily based on another discipline. In an exhibit that presents global warming chiefly as a subject within atmospheric science disciplines, there are still opportunities for integrating related civil engineering subtopics. For example, coastal engineering contends with sea level rise, and the manufacture of some advanced engineering materials emits less greenhouse gas than formerly.

Learning Through Inquiry Inquiry-based learning has become a very popular goal of science museums as well as schools over the past several decades. The basic concept is that an insight achieved by working through a problem will be more meaningful than being told the right answer, or will be a mode of learning that can accompany other kinds of learning. Experimenting with a phenomenon in a lab setting is inquiry-based; hearing a lecture is not. Compared to the usual educational

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experience of engineers in college, their laboratory sessions and design projects would have elements of learning through inquiry, as compared to lectures. With exhibits, a device the visitor can activate and see how it works is inquiry-based; display boards and tableaux that present text and pictures for the visitor to read are not. The current emphasis on inquiry-based learning need not mean that all other content should be avoided. Imagine, for example, how few people would ever learn the meaning of the periodic table of the elements if left to their own devices to experiment with or analyze atomic structure in a self-directed way. Learning through inquiry implies that the point of an exhibit or other science museum offering is not to provide the correct answer to a question, but rather to inspire the visitor to pursue a line of inquiry. The engineer might keep in mind that if a young person is motivated to learn more about engineering, that is a success, whether or not their grasp of engineering facts and concepts is completely accurate. An exhibit or other experience in a science museum can only result in a limited amount of learning on that given day. If the visitor is motivated and curious, that experience in the museum can extend much farther. The journey along that path is an important experience – it is not just the acquisition of accurate scientific and engineering knowledge that is significant. Involving the visitor in thinking as an engineer does is a way to achieve the learning through inquiry objective in an engineering exhibit. Such an exhibit would involve the visitor in balancing competing interests, considering options, and making preliminary designs without committing to them until they are tested.

Visitors, Users, Audiences, Markets Civil engineers who wish to collaborate with science museums may be experts in the content or body of knowledge they wish to convey to the public, but it is the staff of the science museum who are experts in knowing their visitors. The staff and management of a science museum are concerned not only with what the museum offers, but also who it is attempting to reach. This can be variously termed its visitors, users, audiences, or markets, terms that are roughly synonymous but may have different connotations to different people. While the terms “client” or “clientele” in the practice of engineering are positive terms that imply a relationship of service from the engineer to the client, with the engineer responsible to and respectful of the client, the terms seem to have a different, less positive, connotation to science museum staffs, and thus we do not use them here. The board of directors and staff of a science museum may define in a document or brief statement the mission for the organization. One succinct such statement, from the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York, is “To inspire people of all ages and backgrounds to discover the excitement of science through exhibits and programs that promote learning through interaction.” That communicates the fact that this institution will be receptive to exhibit concepts that are exciting and interactive, and that its visitors span the whole range of ages. Some museums include in their mission statements an indication of particular segments of the public whom they wish to serve, such as young children. Some visitor centers indicate that the length of a tour or its content makes it suitable for adults but not for young children. Some

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facilities primarily serve only visitors from their own region, while others have significant numbers of visitors from other parts of the country or from other countries. Mission statements define what a museum strives to do. Visitor studies provide an operational definition of who actually uses the museum. Age level is perhaps the most significant demographic aspect to consider. Museums may seek to attract and serve a broad span of visitors without distinguishing a particular range of ages as their primary aim, but they also may nevertheless have an explicit or assumed set of criteria for reading level, mathematics knowledge, and other background that is presumed of the visitor. Their studies of their visitors, or market research, may have led to a specific outreach effort to bring in a segment of the population that seldom visits the museum. Knowing what the particular museum values in terms of its intended audience is an important first step in the design of exhibits and programs. Chapter 5 provides information on the demographic aspects of both the civil engineering and science museum fields.

Physical Characteristics of the Museum An initial consideration for a planned exhibit is how it will literally fit in the museum’s space. In the USA, Association of Science-Technology Center survey data (ASTC 2006) reveals that the median size in terms of total building floor area of the responding organizations was 6,500 square meters (70,000 square feet), with the median for the amount of interior floor area devoted to exhibits about 2,300 square meters (25,000 square feet). A very large facility, such as the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, has an interior exhibit area of 32,000 square meters (340,000 square feet), while there is almost no limit to how small the exhibit space might be, keeping in mind our broad definition of science museum that includes displays in lobbies of buildings or kiosk-scale exhibits that form a mini-visitor center. The floor space of a science museum is a precious commodity. The engineer needs to remember that the purpose of the museum is usually to present a variety of science and technology topics, and civil engineering, though it is a broad field, is only one of many themes within the museum’s portfolio of subject matter. Another way of looking at the value of exhibit space is in terms of the hidden cost of providing that space. Roughly speaking, a typical exhibit occupies about 10 square meters (100 square feet), and that space costs the museum about $10,000 a year to maintain (ASTC 2006). Even if the cost of a new exhibit is covered by external funding, for example if an engineer provides money to create the exhibit from a research project budget, there is still a large cost to using exhibit space in the museum. Just in terms of the cost of the exhibit itself, rather than its pro rata share of overall building and organization maintenance, the design, construction, and maintenance of a typical exhibit will cost between $200 and $500 per square foot of the floor space it occupies. That means a seemingly small exhibit of 10 square meters (100 square feet) can cost $20,000 to $50,000 to develop or purchase. Some mechanized exhibits with complex internal workings and safety features can cost much more.

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An exhibit that must be fabricated off-site by a vendor, or a traveling exhibit a museum rents, may have significant delivery, storage, and assembly costs. While the exhibit must be large enough to be effective, it should take up as little space as possible. Exhibits that can be mounted outside on the grounds of the museum may afford the possibility of a very large exhibit piece, and very large objects have their own appeal. For example, full-size components of large structures can be effective, such as a full-scale replica or real example of a column of the type that holds up a tall building. Exterior exhibits bring their own challenges, such as exposure to the elements and, unless located in a secure courtyard, exposure to the threats of vandalism and graffiti. In addition to size, the weight of the exhibit can be a concern. Building floors are designed to carry their own weight (dead load) plus the weight of contents and people (live load). (See Figure 3-7). A typical building code requirement for many areas of public buildings in the USA is to design the floors to carry a live load of 100 pounds per square foot (15 kilograms per square meter), as well as a concentrated load of 1,000 pounds (450 kg) that might occur at any point. Suppose one wanted to mount an exhibit consisting of an actual concrete column eight feet tall, shown half cutaway to expose reinforcing steel inside. This object, even though it is only half a complete column, would weigh over a metric ton, 2,200 pounds, and it might have a steel or concrete base to stabilize it weighing half that. We now have a weight about that of an automobile. This is the type of object that would usually be loaded off a truck with a large forklift, small mobile crane, or front-end loader tractor, and driven to its installation location. Driving such a vehicle onto the exhibit floor is not usually possible. Even if this hypothetical exhibit could be dollied to its location without needing a vehicle, its concentrated load on the floor in this example would exceed the allowable limit in the code by a factor of three. Or imagine if one wanted to install in effect a portable swimming pool about three feet (a meter) deep over a large area to demonstrate tsunami waves or how tidal currents in a local bay operate. This would result in a distributed live load on the floor of about 180 pounds per square foot (780 kg per square meter) – almost twice what the overall floor can safely carry. Actual floor load capacities vary, and this example uses typical values.

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Figure 3-7. National Building Museum, Washington, DC. The museum has displayed exhibits of building materials and designs that are sometimes made of masonry or concrete and are thus heavy. Exhibits installed in the side rooms and main atrium of this vast building sometimes require structural engineering analysis to ensure the floor structure can safely carry the load of large, heavy exhibit items. Since it was designed in 1881, the live load capacity of floor areas cannot be simply checked by reference to the current building code.

photo: RR

In addition to size and weight once installed, large exhibits may be difficult to transport to their location in the building. Doorway sizes must be considered, as well as the need to use an elevator if the exhibit will not be located on a ground floor. The main floor area of a building designed as a science museum may have adequate access for rolling in large exhibit objects, but doorway clearances are especially important to check in the case of buildings that have been adapted for exhibit use. The lobby of a building may have a large amount of doorway area to handle the flow of numerous pedestrians, but this required access is divided up into ordinary-sized doorways – a door can’t be too big or it becomes unwieldy. When in doubt, make a full-size cardboard model of the object.

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The Civil Engineering Work Itself As The Exhibit In some cases, the physical limitations of the museum can be eliminated by making the civil engineering work the same thing as the exhibit. See Figure 3-8 and Figure 3-9. The actual civil engineering object – a bridge or dam, for example – may be the feature of the exhibit, and associated displays can explain how it works and how it was designed. In fact, in the case of one recently built large structure, Penobscot Narrows Bridge near Bangor, Maine, a public elevator provides access to the top of one of the 430-foot (130-meter) tall towers of

the cable-stayed bridge. An exhibit at the actual site of the civil engineering construction has several advantages. First, the public sees first-hand the real thing, rather than a simulation or model of it. Reality is an experience intensifier. Second, the centerpiece of the exhibit, the construction itself, is free, that is, it is already paid for and maintained so that it can carry out its civil engineering role. In this sense it is a free resource for the purpose of visitor learning. Third, the owner of the construction is often a public agency and may have an interest in

public education, even if it is not a science museum institution per se. Disadvantages in exploiting a civil engineering work should also be noted. The first is the fact that the prime responsibility of the operator of the civil engineering work is to make sure that it functions reliably – that the dam retains the right amount of water, that the bridge carries its traffic, and

Figure 3-9. Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was of course constructed to allow motor vehicles to drive between San Francisco (foreground) and Marin County. The most famous bridge in the world, which is visited by 10 million people a year, is also an informal education learning “magnet.” Such civil engineering works provide many opportunities for enhancing the insights and experiences of visitors.

photo: RR

Figure 3-8. Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine includesa public observation platform in the tower pictured at left.

photo: Maine Bureau of Parks & Lands

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Figure 3-10. Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, California. The visitor enters the aquarium passing by an exhibit that consists of preserved portions of the original industrial facility, Hovden Cannery. The brick-enclosed boilers and other features of that construction have been made into exhibits. photo: Bruce Reithermann

so on. The site may be difficult to walk around or be remotely located, and sometimes it is not possible to allow visitors into interesting areas because of security or safety reasons, or they might have to be led by tour guides, which is a costly staffing issue. The building itself that a science museum occupies can be treated as an exhibit. Possible examples include: transparent panels revealing the construction of walls, floors, or roofs sensors with live read-outs of forces the building is experiencing, such as the amount

of compressive force coming down through a column live weather data, such as wind speed/pressure or solar radiation on the roof.

The entrance to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for example, which is one of the nation’s more popular informal science education visitor destinations (1.8 million visitors per year), has a large exhibit greeting visitors at the entrance, informing the visitor that a former cannery industrial site was turned into today’s aquarium. (See Figure 3-10.)

Especially while construction is underway, temporary exhibits can use as their prime object of interest the construction that is underway. The visitor who happens along the sidewalk can learn about the process of excavating for basement levels, shoring the soil, placing the foundation, erecting the steel or concrete framework, and other aspects of the construction before them. The common window openings cut in plywood walls surrounding a construction site for passersby (“sidewalk superintendents”) are an age-old exhibit of this type, and one which can be greatly improved upon with a little ingenuity and associated exhibit features. The Chicago Art Institute’s Thorne Room collection of miniature interior building scenes includes one detailed model of the excavation for a large building. One can imagine how similar models, showing the sequence of a building’s construction, could be arranged next to a window looking in on the actual construction. See Figure 3-11. One

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Figure 3-11. A real construction project can be the centerpiece – at no cost to the museum – for an effective “sidewalk exhibit” to familiarize the public with a new building project. Several possible themes and learning experiences are possible. For example, to satisfy the curiosity of workers and shoppers in the neighborhood of a downtown building project, an actual window in the construction barrier wall can be complemented by windows looking into models of the building at various stages of construction. In this example, the theme is “new kid on the block.”

illustration: RR

three models of the building, at stages of construction

window looking in on the actual construction site

model could show the initial step of excavation and foundation work, another as framing rises, another as interior systems and exterior windows and cladding are added. Through these four windows, three looking into the models, the other window looking into the construction site, visitors could assemble the building in their own minds. Adjacent panel information with various facts and figures would provide additional information, but the windows into the world of construction would be the feature that most visitors would appreciate and that would induce them to stop and take notice.

Another ready-made exhibit available at many construction sites is the full-scale mock-up of a portion of the exterior, providing a test of how the various components of the building enclosure will go together: glazing, mullion (window framing), gaskets, cladding material such as concrete or stone, and various connections to the structure. This mock-up is done to

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ensure quality control and to identify any constructability issues prior to undertaking the building enclosure work. After it has served this purpose, it could remain in an area viewable by the public with explanations of what the various components do – which ones insulate, why a special detail is needed at the corner to accommodate movement of the building in wind or earthquake, and so on. In this case, a likely first point of contact for investigating this opportunity would be the engineer or architect for the project, who is usually listed on a display board at the construction site.

Institutions Other Than Science Museums The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) in its annual collection of data on its over 500 members uses these categories for types of institutions: Science center Children’s/Youth Museum Natural History/Anthropology General Museum Specialized Museum Planetarium Aquarium History Museum/Historical Society

The science center, or science museum, is the category we have chiefly discussed here. Children’s museums are a good potential site for hands-on engineering exhibits, but some of the other categories listed above may seem imposing challenges for integration of civil engineering themes. However, we’ve already given examples of how civil engineering exhibits have been featured in art museums, lobbies, and aquariums, and so there is more potential than may first appear. Another example of the presentation of a civil engineering theme at an aquarium is the exhibit on tsunamis at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. “Faces of a Tsunami” is an exhibit that originated in the work of students in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology civil and environmental engineering class, “Communicating Complex Environmental Issues: Designing and Building Interactive Museum Exhibits.” (MIT 2007) This example raises the interesting possibility of involving civil engineering students in the design of exhibits for the public – what might be called “hands on education about hands-on science education.” An example of the way civil engineering can be related to a planetarium, observatory, and astronomy museum is in exhibits that show how a mountaintop observatory has been constructed. When observatories at Mt. Wilson, Mt. Palomar, Kitt Peak, and Mauna Kea were established, for example, civil engineering was employed to provide access roads and build structures to support and house telescopes. Because of the role played by civil engineering in the development of a region, a history museum may also be an appropriate place for an exhibit on some aspect of engineering in the past. The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza in the reign of the pharaoh Khufu or the Great Wall of China in the Ming Dynasty have interesting technical aspects that relate to

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civil engineering, but they are also part of the broad tableau of history. The Panama Canal is a story about civil engineering, but it is also a chapter in the history of world commerce. Steel and later reinforced concrete frame technology and the development of modern structural engineering brought the skyscraper into existence, but that engineering development has also had for over a century a great influence on the daily working experiences of millions of people.

Types of Museum Professionals Civil engineers know the various kinds of professionals in their field, for example the different roles of the “engineer of record” responsible for a particular aspect of the design; the plan checker on a building department staff who checks drawings and calculations; the geotechnical engineer who investigates the site; the construction engineer or construction manager (and in British countries the “quantity surveyor”) who plans and tracks the progress of construction; the architect, who on building projects is usually the lead design professional with the only direct contract with the owner. Similarly in the world of the science museum, there are several kinds of specialized professionals, each with their own kind of expertise and responsibility. Board of Directors Most museums are headed by a board of directors or a similar top-level governance group. Because most science museums are not as large as major corporations that have thousands of employees and dozens of facility locations, the board of a museum may tend to get involved extensively in the museum’s activities rather than limit itself to overall governance. Keeping in mind that the board is ultimately entrusted with the overall wellbeing of the museum, it is necessary to tailor proposals to their guidelines. Their overall directives for the museum may be expressed in strategic plans, which might be accessible on the museum’s website. Civil engineers familiar with non-profit organizations in their engineering realm, such as associations of professional engineers, may be surprised to learn that members of a museum’s board are often significant donors to the institution. In fact, in many cases, directors are placed on the museum board with the expectation they will donate at least a minimum amount. The director on a board of directors of a museum may be committed financially, whereas the civil engineer and museum professional collaborating on an exhibit are involved. As the old saying goes, in making bacon and eggs, the pig was committed, the chicken was involved. Hence, staying in tune with the leadership of the board is important to the success of any effort to launch a collaborative effort between civil engineers and the professionals on the museum’s staff. Director or Executive Director A science museum usually has a person at the top of the staff hierarchy who is both a manager and a scientist or someone familiar with the subjects the museum presents. The director or executive director in the nonprofit world of the museum is the counterpart of the chief executive officer, CEO, in the corporate world. If the exhibit development plan can gain the personal attention of the director of the museum, it is a major advantage. In some

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science museums, the director may be called the chief or head curator, a term that used to be more common but which is now normally used only in art museums or in science museums that emphasize their research collections and services provided to scholars. Exhibit Designers Exhibit designers often go through design steps similar to those followed by a civil engineer, and hence they tend to “speak the same language.” Once criteria and a budget for the exhibit are defined, exhibit designers iteratively explore alternative ideas to refine a design. While civil engineers do not usually have the luxury of building full-scale prototypes of their projects, exhibit designers often mock-up static or working versions of a planned exhibit to test its features, using cardboard or other temporary materials. Some museums have large in-house design staffs, others employ firms to provide many of their exhibit design services. Roughly speaking, large museums have significant in-house design and fabrication capabilities, small ones do not. Thus, a key initial question for any exhibit or other activity development is who will be involved to make it happen all the way through from schematic design to fabrication and installation. Installation of some exhibits can also pose major design challenges for “infrastructure” such as ways to move items into location, and dealing with lighting and acoustics in the space. As noted below, evaluators have a role early-on in the exhibit design process, as well as later when the exhibit once it is installed. Evaluators Evaluation is the means by which the exhibit development team obtains and uses observations of visitors and input from them to create exhibits that attract, engage, and provide learning experiences for their intended audiences. Specialists in evaluation have come to form a distinct component of the workforce in the world of science museums, and they may be found both within a museum’s staff and as outside consultants. While the civil engineer may be an expert on tunnels, water supply systems, or subways, the evaluator is an expert on the audience – its cognitive or intellectual characteristics, affective or emotional factors, and behavioral nature. Here we focus on the evaluation of exhibits. With adaptation, similar evaluation approaches can be used with other offerings, such as web-provided resources, design contests, after-school or summer camp science or engineering projects, or films and multi-media presentations. Engineers should keep in mind that a science museum fills a unique role. The World Wide Web exists independently of science museums, and thus museums tend to emphasize in-person experiences rather than compete with web-provided resources. Books, magazines, journals, newsletters and other printed matter exist apart from the museum, and therefore the museum also avoids trying to compete with those learning resources. Museums are not schools (though they may have educational programs, or schools, within them), and they do not try to duplicate classroom education techniques. If the unique aspect of a museum were to be summed up in one word, it might be experience. It is the experience of the visitor that is the goal of the museum, regardless of the particular topic of an exhibit, film, game, design project, or experiment that the museum provides. Collecting information about and analyzing that experience is the specialty of the evaluator. For example, when considering impacts on visitors, evaluators need to keep an open mind, particularly with children. Is play

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“merely” play, or is the children’s play providing them with phenomenological experience that will latch onto something in their lives outside of the museum? Traditional academic or formal learning measures are usually not aimed at answering such questions, while it is precisely such kinds of experiences that give the science museum a unique role. Evaluators work to inform the development of an exhibit in its initial stages and assess exhibit effectiveness by involving visitors in systematic studies. They are trained to use validated methods that provide accurate depictions of quantitative and qualitative aspects of the visitor’s experience, whereas the unstructured collection of anecdotal data can lead to inaccurate conclusions. An engineer cannot effectively design a project without knowing what criteria will measure success, and in that engineering realm relevant factors may include conformance with construction codes, budget, schedule, aesthetics, and environmental impact. In the realm of the science museum, knowing the objectives to be achieved is also the starting point of an effective project, just as it is in engineering, with relevant criteria including how well an exhibit attracts and holds interest, and what emotional as well as cognitive experience the visitor had. A specialist in evaluation will typically be in charge of the evaluation process. Content experts and exhibit designers do not necessarily represent the public – there is no substitute for direct input from the visitors, and this conduit is provided by the evaluator. In the spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration expressed through this document, we recommend that engineers who are involved as content experts at the initiation of a project also collaborate with the evaluator later on. While some evaluations of science museum exhibits tend to only involve content experts at the initial stage of design, when objectives for the exhibit are set and exhibit designers are provided with information about the technical aspects of their subject, it is important to also involve experts at the later stages of evaluation during the operation of the exhibit and when a final evaluation is eventually completed. Just as evaluations can improve the practice of science museum professionals, involvement of engineers in the evaluation process can improve their abilities with respect to informal science education. Some evaluation criteria and types of evaluation data to be collected do not require expertise in the given subject matter, and thus most evaluators are generalists who evaluate all kinds of exhibits. However, when it comes to evaluating the depth of understanding of an engineering exhibit that a visitor has achieved, this might require evaluating how or whether visitors developed a feel for how engineers think. Most science museum exhibits deal with science, not engineering, and as explained later, scientists have different training, different goals, and different ways of thinking than engineers. If an exhibit objective is to engage visitors in thinking as an engineer does, then logically an engineer would be involved in the evaluation of that aspect. Engineers could offer personal interpretations of the thought processes that they employ in their profession, a viewpoint only engineers have, and compare those ways of thinking with those of the visitors. Interpreting the degree of inspiration and excitement the person experiences with respect to their possible future development in the engineering profession is another type of expertise the engineer can provide to assist the evaluator, because the engineer knows the engineering profession. The evaluation of an engineering

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exhibit may show it to be a success in terms of how attractive it was to visitors and how much they were inspired by it. However, if engineering experts conclude that what the visitors learned or experienced was trivial or even misleading, the overall success of the exhibit would be seen in a different light, even if acquisition of factual knowledge was not the prime goal of the exhibit. Thus, we suggest that evaluators take advantage of the special competences of engineers throughout the process of evaluating engineering exhibits. Evaluators collaborate with the exhibit development team to state clear objectives regarding desired visitor impacts that can be documented and evaluated. Objectives need to be translated into evaluation questions or types of observations and tested before being put into use. Good evaluation helps to produce effective exhibits and save money on design and fabrication. Evaluation can also document success, or lack thereof, and point the way to improvements, and in this role, evaluators help the entire field advance, even when they are employed only for a particular project or client museum. One of the common sources of funding for science museum exhibit development, the National Science Foundation, requires in its current informal science education solicitation (request for proposals) that each proposal provide an explicit response to this question: “Impact Evaluation: What is the evaluation strategy, including methodologies, that you will use to assess your project and its learning impacts? Provide a rationale. Include in the Supplementary Documents [in effect, a section of appendices to an NSF proposal] an evaluation plan that clearly identifies the methodologies that will be used for each impact measure.” (NSF 2008) That NSF reference in itself includes approximately two dozen references the reader may consult for further information. A recent NSF workshop has resulted in a report dedicated to the evaluation topic (Friedman, editor, 2008). That report structures its guidance around the following categories: awareness, knowledge or understanding engagement or interest attitude behavior skills project-specific.

Knowledge of bare-bones facts acquired by a visitor might be easy to evaluate, but note that the above list includes such factors as engagement or attitude that are more difficult to measure and assess. Looking again to the NSF request for proposals (NSF 2008), we see that the three most basic goals are “interest, engagement, and understanding of STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics].” This suggests an evaluation strategy shaped around these three themes. The theme of “interest” leads to evaluation of how much fun or excitement visitors experienced, whether they paid a great deal of attention to something or passed it by; “engagement” implies evaluating whether visitors passively observed exhibits or really got involved in trying them out, and/or if they relate the experience or content to their lives

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outside the museum; and “understanding” touches on cognitive gain or skill development that relates to understanding of the factual basis of the exhibit content or being able to vicariously be an engineer and think like one. Simon (2008) has suggested that under the overall heading of experience are three components: play, personalization, and participation. Play includes learning from the large electronic game industry that by now has spanned across two generations of youth. In a museum setting, there is nothing wrong with fun – it is a key objective. Personalization means that what the museum offers the visitor puts them in the driver’s seat, either literally in terms of being the player of a game-like activity, or in feeling that an exhibit is saying to them, as Simon puts it: “’You be the scientist’, not ‘You watch the scientist.’” Participation, according to Simon, “is not synonymous with ‘interactive.’ In the era of Web 2.0, participation means engagement with content as creator, judge, and distributor, not just consumer.” Exhibit evaluation is closely tied to the development and use of exhibits, and thus it takes place in ways that have proved useful in informing key decisions at different stages. Though stages overlap in practice, typically three main ones are used to structure evaluations: front-end, formative, and summative/remedial. References in the field have grown to constitute a very long list over the past two or three decades, and the resources listed in Appendix D provide links to that voluminous literature. A few introductory or overview works on evaluation and research on visitors that may be consulted include Borun and Korn, editors (1999), Diamond (1999), Dierking and Pollack (1998), and McLean (1993). Front-end Evaluation Front-end evaluation takes place as an exhibition is being planned. An engineer cannot effectively design a construction project without knowing what criteria will measure success, and in that engineering realm relevant factors may include conformance with construction codes, budget, schedule, aesthetics, and environmental impact. In the realm of the science museum, knowing the objectives to be achieved is also the starting point of an effective project, just as it is in engineering. Criteria for a successful science museum exhibit extend to the hard-to-evaluate factors discussed above, such as the way visitors personalize their exhibit experience. Typically, front-end evaluation seeks to understand the visitor’s “personal narrative.” (Doering and Pekarik, 1996) That is, their base knowledge or naïve notions (Borun, Massey, and Lutter 1993) about, and interest in (Korn, 2003) the subject matter. This understanding of what the visitor brings to the exhibit is thought about before exhibit scripts and schematic designs are produced in detail. Front-end evaluation studies commonly make use of interviews, surveys (self-completed questionnaires or those administered by someone else, web-based, or by phone), and/or focus groups. More casual conversations with visitors, e.g., using props such as artifacts on a docent cart, are also very helpful. In situations where the team has very little sense of public knowledge about or interest in a given subject area, front-end evaluation may take place in several steps beginning with the most open-ended type of “fishing trip” which can then inform more precise studies. Casual conversations using props,

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for instance, can be an effective and inexpensive place to start. Props could be a small set of objects or pictures an evaluator could show to visitors to get some initial impressions. What is it about a particular engineering topic that interests visitors? What connects with their own lives? What do they like to pick up and hold? While this type of background research should seek to talk to a wide range of visitors, more formal studies must follow a probability-based sampling protocol. A recent front-end evaluation conducted by Visitor Studies Services for “Beyond Blastoff: Surviving In Space,” a new exhibit at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, California, used a multi-layered approach to visitor interviews. With a standardized survey form to guide interviews, visitors were asked about possible exhibit titles, their understanding of what work astronauts do in space, how astronauts deal with waste, what dangers exist for people in space, and what space junk is. Initial interviews were more open-ended to give researchers a feel for what range of response to expect. That information was used to refine the survey instrument (the questionnaire). Reviewing responses from 40-50 respondents after each day in the field allowed the evaluator to drop areas of inquiry where strong agreement was evident and pursue other lines of questions. This kept the interview from getting too long while stretching a limited budget. (Meluch, 2007) Formative Evaluation Formative evaluation usually involves testing exhibit mock-ups or prototypes before they go into final production. Harris Shettel, an early proponent of formative exhibit evaluation, did a controlled study to determine whether visitor response to mockups was in fact predictive of their response to the same exhibit in completed form, and he found that it was. Shettel and his colleagues propose an approach to guide further research and formative evaluation efforts: “A comprehensive theory of exhibit effectiveness must thus concern itself with three areas: 1) initially attracting viewers to the exhibit, 2) maintaining their attraction throughout the exhibit, and 3) maximizing the amount of relevant learning or “influence” that is achieved on the part of the viewer.” (Shettel et al. 1968, p. 148) In most cases, formative evaluation addresses individual exhibit components. It tends to be the least formal type of evaluation, producing quick findings and minimal reporting -- bring your mark-up pens and duct tape for testing out quickly made changes. Participants can be specifically invited to try out something new, or observed as they approach the prototype on their own. The evaluator can ask users to describe their experience of the prototype while using it, intervene at some point to discuss the exhibit, or interview them after they have finished with it. A user-friendly, step-by-step guide to formative evaluation is available in Try It! Improving Exhibits Through Formative Evaluation (Taylor, 1991). The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry in Portland has twice mocked up entire exhibitions for formative evaluation. Moneyville, an exhibit about math, money and economics, and Animal Secrets were both funded by NSF. “Sneak Previews” did more than test how exhibit elements functioned together as a whole exhibition, they enabled staff to create an event to which they could invite a wide range of people from the institution’s under-represented, target audiences. “Under-represented” by definition means that these

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individuals will not be sufficiently sampled by impromptu evaluations conducted with museum visitors on a typical day. Some additional benefits of this method include giving all the stakeholders a chance to see the entire exhibition during development, assessing the relative popularity and interplay of the components, and testing the extent to which audiences perceive the main messages of the exhibit, using tools typically associated with summative evaluation. (Benne and Bertschi 2005) Summative and Remedial Evaluation Summative and remedial evaluation is conducted after an exhibition is up and running to assess its impacts on visitors and its efficacy in meeting objectives. Remember to give staff a few weeks to iron out the obvious kinks before starting data collection. A simple re-arrangement of the visitor’s pathway or where signage is located that might be accomplished early-on could lead to weeks or months of different exhibit experiences, and detailed data on the initial configuration of the exhibit would not be useful. Summative evaluation assesses how an exhibition is being used, and how well it is meeting its goals in terms of desired visitor impacts. Remedial evaluation also looks for ways to improve the exhibition on these points. These evaluations usually involve an observational study and an exit survey of some type, using probability-based samples. Though it is rare to do experimental studies with control groups, in some cases testing for desired exhibit impact(s) may require using a pre- and post-visit instrument with exhibit visitors. Beverly Serrell (1998) lays out an effective, standardized approach to summative evaluation, which details tracking and timing techniques and offers a concise, self-completed exit survey. In a tracking and timing study, the researcher tracks individual visitors, and their paths and behaviors are recorded on a paper map or via a computerized system. Findings from a tracking and timing study can help us understand how well an exhibit is used, what elements get the most attention (attractive power) and how long they hold visitors attention (holding power, engagement). Tracking and timing can also reveal which elements get overlooked and help to identify problems with layout and/or traffic flow. Serrell offers a specific analysis of visitor dwell time (how long they spent in the exhibition), the number of elements attended to by visitors, and the size of the exhibition (in terms of the number of exhibits and the exhibition’s square footage) to understand how well an exhibition is used in its own right and in comparison with other exhibitions. If the schedule or budget does not allow for a full tracking and timing study, more limited results are possible through behavioral mapping. In a behavioral mapping study, researchers observe the exhibition at short intervals and record on a map where each visitor is located.

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In 2007 Allen and Associates conducted a tracking and timing study as part of the summative evaluation for “Secrets of Circles,” an exhibition created by the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose and funded by the National Science Foundation. The exhibition addresses uses of circles and wheels in everyday life, through history and in different cultures. Figure 3-12 shows a computer-generated map of the movement of 113 visitors among exhibits in the gallery. Exit surveys or interviews, as part of a summative or remedial evaluation, shed light on the effect of the exhibit on visitors. Visitor effects or impacts are usually categorized as cognitive, affective, or behavioral. Self-reflection, e.g., relating exhibit content to one’s own life, can also be detected and serves as an indicator of high engagement. Collecting pre-visit data and comparing this to post-visit data provides a basis for measuring some impacts. These methods all take place onsite at the exhibition, thus they provide feedback about immediate impacts. Oftentimes, visitors come to new or more complete understanding of exhibit content after having time to ponder it outside of the museum. Long-term studies, which typically use follow-up phone interviews several weeks or months post-visit, or can use email where visitors provide that information, can provide insights into whether and how visitors continue to ruminate on exhibit content. Behavioral impacts are best tested this way, such as has been done in the work of John Falk and Lynn Deirking, co-founders of the Institute for Learning Innovation. (Falk, 1995) As a simple example, an exhibit might allow the visitor to measure the energy efficiency of a simulated room, changing variables “on the fly” such as insulation values of walls or ceiling or cracking a window open. An initial evaluation might conclude that the exhibit imparted a high awareness of the relative importance of infiltration (air leakage) in heating a room. (Infiltration is a major factor, which the reader has no doubt experienced as a sudden draft when a door is opened briefly on a cold day). A post-visit follow-up survey might tease out data on behavior -- whether visitors actually close all

Figure 3-12. A movement map resulting from a tracking and timing study. The diagram depicts temporal and spatial data on how visitors moved through an exhibit at the Children’s Discovery Museum, San Jose, California. This is an example of the collection of quantitative data on the response of visitors to an exhibit.

illustration: Allen and Associates

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windows when turning on the heat, or have gone to the hardware store and bought and installed weather-stripping, whether they close the flue on their fireplace when it is not in use, etc. Evaluation Methods Which evaluation tools are appropriate is determined by the evaluation questions, conditions “on the ground” or “on the floor,” the particular characteristics and objectives of an exhibit, and by budget constraints. Whenever possible, it is best to use more than one approach to answer evaluation questions to enable the evaluator to triangulate on valid findings. Self-completed questionnaires, for instance, are the least labor intensive to conduct and thus least costly. The cost of analysis varies with questionnaire content, which can be qualitative and/or quantitative in nature, and vary in volume. Interviews and focus groups are more labor intensive and produce qualitative data that can be cumbersome to analyze. Observational studies are labor intensive to conduct and produce detailed data that must be managed meticulously, though the analysis is quite straightforward. In large institutions that have evaluators on staff, front-end and formative evaluation phases are often managed in-house. Summative evaluation is commonly conducted by an outside consultant, to provide more objectivity. The evaluator must be well grounded in evaluation of informal learning environments, though expertise in the exhibit content is not required. That said, analysis of evaluation data requires an appropriately deep understanding of exhibit content on the part of the evaluator, and as mentioned above, it is desirable to obtain input from the engineers involved in providing the content for an engineering exhibit in the evaluation process. Including the evaluators on the team throughout the exhibit development process allows them to represent the visitor while gaining understanding of the often subtle and complex learning involved. Working with an outside evaluator has the added benefit of building staff capacity for evaluation by bringing in new ideas and skills. Many resources for finding evaluators exist and are included in Practical Evaluation Guide (Diamond 1999) and in the resources listed in Appendix D. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Academy of Engineering has initiated a program of many small exhibits and activities called “Ingenious – Engaging Citizens; Engaging Engineers.” Specific projects funded under the program are expected to “raise society’s awareness of the science, art, practice and impact of engineering; and to provide public engagement, learning, and training opportunities for engineers.” (Royal Academy of Engineering 2008a) The second half of this mission statement highlights a less common aim and one that may be under-utilized. Instead of just striving for visitor impact (“society’s awareness”), this program seeks to have an effect on the engineering community. The evaluation reports submitted at the end of these projects have quantitative as well as qualitative criteria. The former include an enumeration of the specific activities, events, or resources produced; the type of audiences reached and their numbers; and other data such as website usage. The qualitative criteria include the percentages of the audience who found the activity or resource enjoyable, interesting, informative, interactive, and well-organized. The guidance document for evaluation (Royal Society of Engineering 2008b) offers the possibilities of internal evaluation (by someone involved in the project); peer evaluation (“sibling” projects evaluating each other); and external evaluation (e.g., hiring a consultant, obtaining the free

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services of a graduate student in education). Methods suggested include observation (e.g., observing behavior, such as which portions of an exhibit people are drawn to, what they manipulate); interview (allows for more in-depth information, also more expensive because of the time required); focus group (small group meetings focused on particular questions or topics; may require more skill than interviewing one-on-one to keep group dynamics on track); questionnaire (inexpensive, allows for anonymity of responder, may introduce bias in who takes the time to fill out questionnaires); secondary sources (referring back to earlier studies dealing with similar situations). In addition to the methods discussed here, there are other methods and technologies that can be employed, such as: concept maps, card sorts, giving visitors cameras to record their visits, tape recording visitor conversations, computerized systems to collect data on visitor movement through a space or bar code tracking of visitor usage of exhibits, and “polling stations” that allow the visitor to immediately “vote” or express preferences and reactions concerning the feature of the exhibit they have just used. Evaluation, along with other aspects of informal science education, is likely to evolve in the future as more research and practice results are obtained and technology advances. Audiences That Have Connections with Teachers and Schools The museum-going public can be approximately categorized as either casual visitors or tour group members. Casual visitors are those individuals or families who come to the museum for their own reasons, while tour groups are likely to have some type of mission or focus. For instance, school field trip groups, the lifeblood of many museum institutions, are under the direction of teachers. For example, students who wander the exhibit halls, worksheet in hand, looking for a predetermined list of items, tend to have a resulting narrow focus when engaging with exhibits. Field trips with tight time budgets may require groups to move along at a particular pace, or visit only selected portions of an exhibit. Thus, while informal science education is typically characterized as being self-directed, the field trip is sometimes what might be called semi-self-directed. Including teachers in the front-end evaluation process is extremely important and can be done with focus groups, interviews, and/or surveys. Most science museums have a teacher advisory board, or at least a few friendly local teachers, who can be called upon by the exhibit development team. Teachers, and educators on the museum staff, will be aware of and sensitive to the science education standards of the particular state. Addressing state standards in the exhibit, related educational materials, and outreach to teachers of particular grade levels is critical to field trip participation. The influence of aligning museum content with state education standards is discussed further in the last section of this chapter. The evaluation techniques discussed above primarily focus on the casual visitor. Teachers and field trips, being an important part of most science museum audiences, should be included in exhibit development and evaluation processes, but doing so requires special consideration. Field trips are on a tight schedule, which limits opportunities for on-site evaluations with teachers, even if these field trip leaders may be willing. Approaching students for interviews, and even observing them in exhibitions, can be threatening to them

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and/or their chaperones. These limitations can sometimes be overcome via advance communications with the school and teacher. In 2006, the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California began a two-year project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Museum was charged with developing new applications for Science on a Sphere (SOS). SOS is a sophisticated computer-driven projection system that was created to display satellite data collected by NOAA on a large, lightweight sphere, which is invisibly suspended in the viewing gallery. Brainstorming sessions, patterned after focus groups, were conducted with teachers and students. One group included middle school and high school teachers who taught a variety of subjects, including science, math, history, and social science. The other session brought in middle school students of varying backgrounds. Both groups watched a demonstration of the new technology and then had an open-ended discussion of possible applications. (Meluch 2006) This worked around some of the limitations of trying to conduct evaluations during ordinary school field trips that were discussed above. Evaluation and Visitor Research Evaluation and visitor research are often mentioned together, and though they are closely related there are also some differences. Generally speaking, evaluation is the term applied to a specific situation such as a particular exhibit or museum program, and findings are not intended to be broadly generalized to the entire museum. Visitor research tends to be broader in nature and not necessarily applied to a specific project. Ross Loomis treats evaluation as a type of research. His book, Visitor Evaluation (1987), opens with a chapter on evaluation and management. The goal of evaluation is to provide information that will assist managers and other museum professionals to “judge the worth of the commodity they are dealing with and guide their decision-making.” (Loomis, 1987) In the business world, “visitor studies” might translate into “market research,” so that a company gets a view of its whole clientele, while “evaluation” is akin to assessing how one particular product is marketed. A useful overview of research into visitor motivation and satisfaction can be found in Jan Packer’s “Beyond Learning: Exploring Visitors’ Perceptions of the Value and Benefits of Museum Experiences” (Packer, 2008). Packer describes Zahava Doering’s work at the Smithsonian where she developed “an empirical list of ‘satisfying experiences’ that individuals seek – and generally find – in museums.” Those experiences fall into four categories: object experiences, cognitive experiences, introspective experiences, and social experiences. Packer then goes a step further to look at visitors’ perceived benefits of those experiences by interviewing visitors at the Queensland Museum of natural history, cultural heritage, science, and human achievement in Australia. In visitor responses, Packer identifies three main areas of benefits: psychological wellbeing, subjective wellbeing, and restoration. Visitor research like Doering’s and Packer’s complements evaluation by giving us a wide-angle perspective on visitors. This helps museums and science centers to “meet visitors where they are” by presenting exhibits that are planned with visitor motivations and demographic characteristics in mind.

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Appendix D provides further sources of information on both evaluation and visitor research. Docents A key consideration in the initial planning of an exhibit is whether docents will be required. Docents are “on-the-floor” staff who personally interact with the visitors and act as guides, and they can add to the visitor experience. However, even if the docents are volunteers, as is usually the case (on average, the science museum has more volunteer workers than paid staff), there is a cost to providing this staffing. Volunteer docents must be trained, their shifts scheduled, their work supervised. It is desirable to have the safety and other technical aspects of an exhibit designed so that a docent is not needed to operate it. There are however many ways staff who are mingling with visitors or providing them with special activities can enhance the visitor’s experience, if budget allows. To remain in the spirit of self-directed learning on the part of the visitor, the role of the staff is to open up opportunities for the visitor rather than teach the visitor a pre-determined set of facts. The reader can probably recall enlightening experiences in various museum settings where a docent added value to their visit, such as having a live animal brought out for visitors to see, or looking through a telescope that the docent skillfully pre-aims at an interesting astronomical object. Tours of actual civil engineering works also sometimes involve guides. For example the US Bureau of Reclamation has operated tours of Hoover Dam that are partly guided and partly unguided. About a million people a year enjoy this memorable experience.

Types of Museum Programs We sometimes tend to think that a science museum is the sum of its exhibits, along with the collection in storage that is not on exhibit at the moment. Exhibits are probably the core type of program offered by a museum and one that may most excite the imagination of the civil engineer wishing to collaborate with a science museum or mount an informal science education effort. There are other kinds of programs however, including the following. Web-provided Content Web-provided content and learning tools can be categorized into two types: those that accompany an exhibit, and those that stand alone as their own resources. Increasingly, every exhibit has a web counterpart, if only to serve as an advertisement to induce people to visit the museum. In fact, museums seldom provide a complete web archive of information on past exhibits, because they are not effective as ads for current exhibits. (The lack of “institutional memory” or archiving of past exhibits for public access over the web made the research in our project more difficult). The almost limitless quantity of computerized information storage, or web-accessed software tools, means that the depth of learning about a particular exhibit can be considerably increased by pre- or post-visit web visitors. Some science museums have begun to develop websites that visitors can access after their in-person visit, to access their own experiment or design project that they began when on-site. A museum that has no planetarium or floor space devoted to astronomy and space travel may nevertheless be a service to a wide community via its website in providing animations, live video, graphics, and text relating to a space mission in the news. Thus, web resources can

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stand alone in the absence of a related physical exhibit. Especially useful to teachers are free, web-accessible files such as pdf’s that they can use in their classrooms and with science projects. For a field trip to a science museum to be most valuable, resources should be provided for pre-visit in-class activities or homework assignments, and for guides that can be used in the museum. Perhaps the most common guide printed out in advance by teachers for use of students in museum field trips has been simply a “scavenger hunt” checklist. Guides that involve deeper intellectual activity can also be devised, such as devising experiments or construction projects in the classroom that relate to something that will be experienced in the museum. The provision of free content over the web can to some extent be orthogonal to rather than parallel with the goal of enticing visitors to come to the museum (and to pay entrance fees essential to the financial health of the museum). Also, because of the vast abundance of web resources available on most topics today, a museum usually does not feel that it should spend significant time adding to that volume, as compared to providing museum experiences only it can offer. After-school Programs Some science museums offer after-school programs either at their facility or at a school. Survey data (ASTC 2006) show that almost half the science museum respondents (worldwide) provide after-school programs and slightly over half in the United States. The time spent in the program by a young person in a given day is a significant factor, because it is a few hours. By contrast, the time spent at a particular exhibit is usually a few minutes. Among the civil engineering themes most suitable for after-school programs are construction projects, such as building bridges or other model structures. With simple materials, a young student, or group of students, can work on the same construction project over a period of days or weeks. Traveling Exhibits A traveling exhibit is designed to be installed at one museum, then crated up and transported to one or more others. This has the advantage that the same resource can be used at several locations. Traveling exhibits are desirable because science museums like to frequently vary their exhibits to maintain new appeal for repeat visitors and to keep abreast of current science topics. Some museums regularly produce traveling exhibits and rent them to other institutions. For example, the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York, offers a dozen different traveling exhibits, one of which, Tech City, features civil engineering concepts. According to survey data (ASTC 2006), the median floor area devoted to a traveling exhibit is about 4,000 to 5,000 square feet (370 to 465 square meters). In the wide range of sizes of traveling exhibits, many are small (approximately 1,000 square feet or 93 square meters), while some exceed (10,000 square feet, 930 square meters) or larger in size.

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Figure 3-13. Marquee at the Exploratorium’s theater, San Francisco, California, 2006. Ashraf Habibullah, head of the firm Computers and Structures, Inc., which is one of the world’s leading providers of civil engineering software, gave a talk on seismic design illustrated with graphically appealing computer animations of bridges and other structures. His earthquake talk fit the newsworthy city-wide theme of the centennial of the April 18, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

photo: RR

Special Events Special events include lectures, news-related museum programs, and “experts on the floor” at the museum. Civil engineering topics such as a major construction project in the area may be desirable additions to a museum’s special events offerings. Engineers must keep in mind that the science museum staff has a first-hand appreciation for their audience. While trying not to oversimplify the material, the engineer involved in such an event must be aware of what level of information is appropriate for the audience, and what presentation style is desirable. A lecture may be a common engineering means of conveying information to university students and to professional engineers, but the science museum staff may have in mind an interactive, question-and-answer format or other ways of using the engineer’s expertise in the museum setting. In the presentation on earthquake engineering indicated in Figure 3-13, Ashraf Habibullah had volunteer children come to the stage to participate in his presentation, which was an effective way to engage the audience.

An annual engineering day is common in many areas, sponsored by local and national engineering organizations such as the National Engineers Week Foundation, a formal coalition of more than 75 professional societies, major corporations and government agencies. An example of this type of event is the 2008 “Discover Engineering Family Day” hosted by the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, attended by 7,300 visitors. Towers were built and other activities carried out during that day. While an exhibit or activity that only has a life of a day or a few days at a special event may seem too short a timespan to be worthwhile, it may be an opportunity to expose the exhibit to many thousands of people. Field Trips Science museums can facilitate field trips by schools to sites of interest, or the site itself may be the museum, for example a visitor center associated with a civil engineering work. Engineers can help develop field trip guides for teachers and students or provide volunteer engineer guides for pre-arranged trips. As a general rule, elementary school children are most likely to be taken on field trips, middle school and high school students to a lesser extent. As most readers will recall, one or more trips to science museums were memorable field trips in their early schooling. In the ASTC survey (ASTC 2006), slightly over three-fourths of the respondents reported that they were field trip resources for schools in their area.

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Professional Development for Teachers Many science museums hold training sessions for teachers, using their facilities for demonstrations and other activities and keying the content to the curriculum of a particular grade level and/or type of course. This museum-based service can be independent of a museum exhibit, or associated with exhibits. The key to such professional development training is a close matching of content with standards-based curricula. While national agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Education develop standards, it is at the state level that educational standards are most specific and have the biggest influence on school districts and teachers. For example, knowing the mathematics to be mastered at a given grade level, the engineer could assist in providing interesting analysis examples that meet those criteria. In addition to training sessions, maintaining a “lending library” of items to distribute to teachers is an option. Inevitably, items in the kit get lost, damaged, or misplaced, and keeping track of the lending library function is a significant task for a staff member. If classroom kits are needed, a more reliable delivery method is to obtain enough funding to give the kits away to teachers who attend a training session. Professional development for teachers is an ongoing activity. A particular civil engineering project attempting to involve this kind of training should find out what the local schools currently do. For example, are there are designated days in the year for this type of training? In an engineering research proposal that intends to involve teacher training, some budget for a daily stipend for participating teachers will greatly boost attendance.

Gift Shop and Visitor Center Products In the present era, one of the important aspects of the architectural planning of a science museum or other kind of museum is the gift store. Readers are challenged to recall a science museum they have visited that did not have a gift store strategically located to capitalize on customer traffic. Look at the floor plan of a science museum, or art museum for that matter, and usually you will see that one must either enter or exit the museum through or by this commercial space. A product on the shelf that has educational value and can help the museum’s revenues is always desirable. Rarely do science museums develop their own line of products, more often relying on vendors to supply ready-to-stock items. Small models of construction that fit the theme of a civil engineering exhibit that could be produced by a vendor are one possibility that would fit the civil engineering theme. Printed materials, for example, attractive posters, are another option to give the visitor something to take away.

Financial Realities The civil engineer may assume that a science museum has a comfortable budget with a ready supply of funds to apply to the next bright idea that comes to its attention. The museum, on the other hand, may already have many good exhibit concepts in preliminary development that cannot all be pursued because of costs. In the ASTC survey (ASTC 2006), 72% of the worldwide respondents were nonprofit organizations, and the corresponding figure in the USA was 80%. “Nonprofit” of course does not mean the organization can sustain itself if it

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does not make a profit and instead has expenses that exceed income. Sources of income for a nonprofit organization may vary from year to year, as agencies and foundations change their funding priorities and as market forces may increase or decrease the number of paying visitors. In the United States, ASTC survey data state that 16% of the science museums or science centers are operated by local, state, or federal government. In some cases, government funding is steady and dependable, but in other cases, funding is subject to vagaries of an agency’s budget and changes in priorities. In the USA, on average approximately 45% of the operating revenue of science museums comes from earned income, such as admission fees and sales in a visitor shop or cafe; 25% from public funding; 25% from private donations; and 5% from an endowment. (ASTC 2006) (See Figure 3-14). On the operating expense side of the ledger, the median personnel cost was slightly over half of the total operating expense. The cost of an exhibit is not just the cost of acquiring the physical item but also the staffing needed. Staffing could include expense at the very beginning in planning and designing an exhibit. Staffing can still be a significant cost even if an exhibit is acquired ready-to-use, as in the case of a traveling exhibit.

A collaboration in which the engineer helps bring in the funding for the exhibit or other program element is always desirable and often essential. Museums are usually adept at developing their usual philanthropic and government agency sources of financial support, but engineers may be aware of other funding sources, such as donations by large engineering or construction firms or agencies, funding that is aimed at engineering education, or engineering associations and foundations. A research project may be able to apply its own funds as a subcontract to a museum to cover its costs.

Figure 3-14. One of the most essential components in the contemporary science museum is pictured at the far left (the ATM cash machine). Whether from individual or corporate donations, foundation and government funds, endowment income, entry fees, or museum shop sales, the sustainability of a science museum depends on bringing in sufficient income to balance costs.

photo: RR

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Figure 3-15. The leaning tower (campanile) of Pisa. Under the footprint of the tower, the soil on one side was softer than on the other. Even as the tower was only half erected it began to tilt, a process which continued until recently when civil engineers devised stabilization methods to unobtrusively keep it from leaning over to the point of collapse. As a world famous icon, the leaning tower of Pisa could introduce young children to what is formally called geotechnical engineering, using models of towers and soil or simulated soil materials, and letting them try out stabilization methods.

photo: RR

Curricular Connections Educational standards set goals for what students should learn in various grade levels. Typically, these standards state what the student should learn, not how they should learn it. Thus, the teacher has some latitude in using various types of materials and learning exercises to enable students to learn the necessary content. Standards-based education was developed to improved the quality of K-12 education and prevent gaps and deficiencies in the curricula of school systems. A recent National Science Teachers Association review has found a number of innovative ways to relate educational standards to learning about science and technology (NSTA 2008). Themes explored in science museums that expect to mobilize significant use by teachers and students must fit the science standards for that particular grade level or range of grades. In the ASTC survey (ASTC 2006), over three-fourths of the responding organizations reported that they provided workshops for teachers. This high rate is because an attempt to connect a museum’s offerings with the curricula of schools must usually be done by involving teachers, who in turn are the ones who will involve their students. For example, imagine an exhibit concept having to do with the geotechnical engineering principle of how weight placed on soil causes it to compact. All soil (even rock to a minute degree) compacts under load, but some soils do so more than others. The leaning tower of Pisa could be a graphic organizing theme and icon, and a hands-on model would allow the visitor to experiment with how soil of different properties under a model tower can cause it to settle unevenly and tip. (See Figure 3-15.) To be an appealing field trip for teachers and their students in Minnesota, this could be keyed to this fifth grade benchmark in state educational standards: “The student will investigate the formation, composition and properties of soil.” (Minnesota Academic Standards Committee 2003). In the fourth grade, by contrast, there are learning goals related to water, rather than soil. Knowing how civil engineering knowledge of a particular type fits into these educational frameworks is the key to ensuring that the teachers will use the content and marketing to the right audience. You would expect better success in involving fifth grade teachers in Minnesota in a field trip to such an exhibit or participating in a teacher training session than fourth grade teachers. The design of the exhibit might make it appealing to and understandable by fourth graders as well, but knowing how the exhibit content aligns with state science standards can refine an outreach strategy.

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Another example of how a civil engineering exhibit can be designed to align with state science standards can be hypothesized based on the standards of the State Board of Education of California. The first thing that may be perplexing to an engineer in trying to make a connection of a civil engineering theme with school curricula is that schools do not have courses called civil engineering. Students take classes called “science,” or in high school particular sciences such as physics and chemistry. Students take classes called mathematics or arithmetic or a particular branch of math like geometry. But K-12 curricula do not (at least not yet) typically include a course called “engineering.” The first challenge is to find an existing course where civil engineering knowledge fits. Assume that the civil engineering theme of a research project is the use of instruments that can sense aspects of the built and natural environment (sensors) and automatically apply that data to the control of civil engineering works. For example, a sensor that detects the motion of a building as it begins to sway in the wind may trigger the operation of moving weights that are out of sync with the wind-induced motion and thus “calm the building down” and make the building more comfortable to work in. (This is called “active structural control” and has actually been used in practice). We will assume the engineering research project must have an education and outreach component for kindergarten through high school, K-12, as per the funding agency’s requirements. How would such a high-tech civil engineering research theme be related to K-12 school curriculum? Trying to provide a learning resource in the science museum setting that effectively deals with the entire K-12 spectrum of ages is a little like trying to talk to an audience spread out over 180 degrees or more around you. Auditoriums and classrooms are usually designed so that seating is arranged so that the lines from the speaker at the front of the room to any member of the audience is not more than about 30-45 degrees either side of the centerline. A similar principle is at work when trying to deal with education and outreach requirements that refer to K-12. It may be wise at the outset to pick a range or even one specific grade level in that wide K-12 span, or to provide a given theme or principle that can be learned about at different levels with different features of the exhibit. For example, students take math in every grade level, but the subject matter becomes more advanced with advancing grades. An exhibit that can appeal to multiple ages, each having different math backgrounds (or backgrounds in other subjects), is especially desirable. Often, some aspect of state science standards, such as learning by inquiry, are pertinent at every grade level and merely progress in complexity from K to 12. Given that appeal to a “K through gray,” young to old audience, is desirable, we’ll assume we have a tight budget and need to involve a targeted segment of the area’s teachers as our highest priority. To use the example of California, the seventh grade science curriculum features the life sciences, making that a poor fit for this particular wind engineering topic. In the eighth grade, however, students are expected to learn about, among other things, topics that can be related to our civil engineering research theme of sensors that drive a device that counteracts wind motion (Table 3-1).

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Table 3-1. Excerpt from Academic Content Standards, 8th Grade Science

(California State Board of Education 2008):

Motion 1. The velocity of an object is the rate of change of its position. As a basis for

understanding this concept: a. Students know position is defined in relation to some choice of a standard

reference point and a set of reference directions. b. Students know that average speed is the total distance traveled divided by

the total time elapsed and that the speed of an object along the path traveled can vary.

c. Students know how to solve problems involving distance, time, and average speed.

d. Students know the velocity of an object must be described by specifying both the direction and the speed of the object.

e. Students know changes in velocity may be due to changes in speed, direction, or both.

f. Students know how to interpret graphs of position versus time and graphs of speed versus time for motion in a single direction.

Forces 1. Unbalanced forces cause changes in velocity. As a basis for understanding this

concept: 1. Students know a force has both direction and magnitude. 2. Students know when an object is subject to two or more forces at once, the

result is the cumulative effect of all the forces. 3. Students know when the forces on an object are balanced, the motion of the

object does not change. 4. Students know how to identify separately the two or more forces that are

acting on a single static object, including gravity, elastic forces due to tension or compression in matter, and friction.

5. Students know that when the forces on an object are unbalanced, the object will change its velocity (that is, it will speed up, slow down, or change direction).

6. Students know the greater the mass of an object, the more force is needed to achieve the same rate of change in motion.

7. Students know the role of gravity in forming and maintaining the shapes of planets, stars, and the solar system.

Here we see a very close alignment between these general science standards and the specific applied science or engineering research topic at hand. In our example, it may lead one down the path of developing exhibits or activities that are particularly suitable for eighth graders, and, equally important, marketing the resource to eighth grade teachers. Rather than trying to put on teacher training sessions for instructors in grades K through 12, one could prioritize ones budget for outreach to eighth grade teachers. It also means an institution named a Children’s Museum would be a poor choice for partnering – you wouldn’t tap into a ready outreach conduit to eighth grade teachers. Involvement of science educators at that eighth grade level at the beginning, when the proposal is being written, would be a smart step. This might be accomplished via ongoing connections with schools in the region through a museum, rather than inventing this relationship from scratch. In this hypothetical example, the education and outreach element in our hypothetical civil engineering research project now begins to have these elements: (1) We began with the goal of developing a civil engineering exhibit or activity about sensors, motion, and forces. (2) A

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science museum that caters to middle school-age students seemed to be a good fit. And (3), outreach to eighth grade teachers becomes part of the project, with a teacher training session designed to fit the curricular standard for their grade level. Any exhibits, web resources, or other offerings would be designed to fit this logical plan, and the project team begins to be defined: the civil engineers on the research project, providing funding for the exhibit and interacting with a science museum catering to middle school students and with contact with area eighth grade science teachers. The National Science Standards promulgated by the National Research Council (NRC 1996) are another guide, though they tend to be more general than state standards. The NRC standards include suggestions (see Table 3-2) for the teaching of science in the classroom Similar concepts may be applicable by science museums designing exhibits or activities, so that the museum and schools will be in alignment with these learning methods.

Table 3-2. National Science Education Standards, Recommendations for Teaching Methods (NRC 1996)

Less Emphasis On More Emphasis On

Treating all students alike and responding to the group as a while

Understanding and responding to individual student’s interests, experiences, and needs

Rigidly following curriculum Selecting and adapting curriculum Focusing on student acquisition of information Focusing on student understanding and use of

scientific knowledge, ideas, and inquiry processes Presenting scientific knowledge through lecture, text, and demonstration

Guiding students in active and extended scientific inquiry

Asking for recitation of acquired knowledge Providing opportunities for scientific discussion and debate among students

Testing students for factual information at the end of the unit or chapter

Continuously assessing student understanding

Maintaining responsibility and authority Sharing responsibility for learning with students Supporting competition Supporting a classroom community with cooperation,

shared responsibility, and respect Working alone Working with other teachers to enhance the science

program Successful exhibits and other science museum activities have sometimes been developed by trying new concepts, rather than following the consensus-based standards of a given era. For example, a highly motivated science teacher might develop a robust science initiative by herself or himself to pursue a creative vision (that is, “working alone” which these NRC standards suggest should be de-emphasized). It might be that trying to pull other science teachers along in the same direction (“working with other teachers to enhance the science program”) may stymie progress, rather than further it. The teacher may have obtained an NSF grant (“Research Experiences for Teachers” program) to do participate in a science or engineering research project one summer and obtained so much knowledge and so many ideas for innovative activities that trying them out in his or her own class would be an efficient way to move ahead. The goal of working together could be pursued after that one teacher tested some possibilities, fulfilling the spirit if not always the letter of the standard about “working with other teachers.” Perhaps every generalization is a good one – if one knows when to apply it and when not to, or how flexibly to apply it.

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In addition to science standards, technology learning standards have recently been advocated by organizations such as the International Technology Education Association. These standards, sometimes called Standards for Technological Literacy, often delve deeper into engineering fields than the science standards do, and thus they are another source to consult in trying to align informal education with school curricula. (ITEA 2005) To engineers, there can be significant differences between “technology” and “engineering,” though these terms tend to be used interchangeably in the science museum world. For example, to a civil engineer, the use of steel wire with a very high tensile strength was a key technological feature of the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. A key engineering feature was the ability to predict the parabolic shape of the resulting main suspension bridge cables once they carried the load of the bridge deck. Such subtleties in distinguishing between “technology” and “engineering” may have their place in a particular exhibit, but engineers should be advised that science museum professionals often use these terms more loosely. A standard called a “technology” learning standard may be the ideal way to tie an engineering theme to learning goals.

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Chapter 4 Purposes of Partnerships Between Civil Engineers and Science Museums

Civil Engineering Themes as Ways for Visitors to Understand the World Around Them The field of civil engineering provides rich ore that has not yet been exhaustively mined by science museums. The public is intrinsically interested in understanding the science and engineering of everyday life and their surroundings, and civil engineering is a large part of that daily experience. Thus one purpose of a collaboration between civil engineers and science museums is to reveal to the public their everyday environment. From the concrete in the sidewalk people walk on, the bridge they drive over, the building they work or live in, the water that comes out the faucet into their kitchen sink – civil engineering is ubiquitous. Thus, it is a field that can be exploited with great flexibility so that civil engineering content is fitted to a given museum exhibit or program theme. For example, the chemistry of water may be a primary focus of an exhibit, but the civil engineering display of how water is stored in a dam outside of the city, then piped downhill to its destinations, could introduce the phenomenon of fluid pressure, with hands-on exhibit possibilities. Today’s civil engineering department of a university is almost always called a civil and environmental engineering department, and water supply systems are a major aspect of the discipline. If energy conservation is a theme a museum is interested in, this could include cutaway models of walls of residences, showing better and worse levels of insulation or thermal capacity, literally bringing the exhibit theme home. An exhibit primarily devoted to the earth science topic of plate tectonics could also include a shake table exhibit showing the local-scale effect of that global process, namely earthquakes and their strong motion effects on buildings, applying the global-scale theme to the level of the building in which a person lives or works. As the subtitle of one civil engineering book indicates – “A Confluence of Engineering and Politics” -- (Billington and Jackson 2006), the story of how large dams were built in the New Deal Era throughout the Western United States is not just about hydrostatic pressures and concrete forms such as buttresses or arches that can resist them. For the public to understand how influential aspects of the built environment came to be requires an understanding of engineering along with its social context. Exhibition possibilities for combining these twin themes are almost endless, and they open the door to a variety of visitor experiences. Some visitors may be attracted to physical things and the engineering that produced them, others to the process by which engineering was part of a political decision making process, still others to the synthesis of these two themes.

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Figure 4-1. A construction and engineering career day for high school students held at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC in April 2006. In addition to being able to talk with people who have various careers and obtain printed information, visitors could try out hands-on exhibits. At right, students mix mortar and lay up a section of brick wall.

photo: RR

Recruitment of Future Engineers Recruitment of future civil engineers is one of the missions of engineering organizations such as the American Society of Civil Engineers and agencies such as the National Science Foundation, but it is not necessarily a central mission of most science museums. The museums may at most have a broad goal of interesting their visitors in science and engineering in general. Thus, an exhibit or other program element designed with the goal of engineering recruitment in mind must first meet the ongoing goals of the science museum, such as providing interesting and fun activities for their broad spectrum of visitors. To the degree that the activity stimulates the visitor and is entertaining (see Figure 4-1), the museum benefits, while the engineering field also succeeds in making the case that engineering can be an enjoyable and rewarding career. Chapter 5 discusses demographic aspects of the civil engineering profession, which relates to the priority now placed on recruiting members of demographic categories that are underrepresented in the field, i.e., women and ethnic/racial minorities.

Note that the “pipeline” through which the graduate engineer travels, college degree in hand, ready to enter the workforce, extends back much farther to his or her early years. High school students who know about and become interested in engineering can make more informed decisions about college applications and choices of majors. These high school students, in turn, probably developed inclinations toward or away from science and mathematics in junior high school/middle school, and without an adequate science and math

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background, the remainder of the path to a profession in civil engineering becomes closed. And of course, a vast amount of learning occurs in the elementary school years, when students first encounter the many different disciplines of learning and acquire initial knowledge about careers. Ways to engage young people in learning about civil engineering can thus be employed at every age level.

Fulfilling Education and Outreach Requirements of Research Projects Many grant-funded research projects in engineering come with education and outreach requirements attached. This presents another purpose for partnership activities between science museums and civil engineers. From the civil engineer’s point of view, this may be the primary impetus for wanting to collaborate with a science museum. For example, many NSF research grant programs have requirements in their solicitations that lead to roughly five to ten percent of the total project’s budget being spent on education of the broad public audience or a focused subset of it, and outreach to the general public to inform them of the significance of the research. (In this context, we exclude the usual involvement of graduate students in an engineering research project and use “education” here only in connection with the broader public). Engineers vying for such grants may see the science museum as an ideal organization for fulfilling these requirements, but the engineers must keep in mind that the science museum was not established merely to serve that purpose. On the other hand, since funding from the research grant would be available to subcontract to the museum, there is something financial to gain on the part of the museum. In recent years, some of the larger amounts of funding to science museums have come in the form of education and outreach elements of large research programs. The NSF nanotechnology research program, for example, has been accompanied by a large effort to engage science museums in communicating that research to the public via informal science education (NISE 2008). Planning efforts have provided a context within which researchers and museums can collaborate on that nanotechnology research theme. (Crone 2006) The engineer must keep in mind that even if the research grant would pay for an exhibit’s development and refinement, floor space is limited, and adding one particular exhibit means foregoing development of another. Museums often embark on multi-year strategies for developing certain kinds of exhibits, either in terms of themes or the technology or type of exhibit (e.g., sometimes computer-based exhibits are sought, sometimes they are not preferred). Thus, while the prospect of funding for a new exhibit can make an education and outreach role in a proposal potentially desirable, a museum may decline to be involved because of various internal reasons.

Public Understanding of Engineering The public is faced with many issues in a democracy that relate to civil engineering, a very common one being voting on bond measures to construct infrastructure such as water supply or wastewater systems, a new airport or bridge, or a flood control project. Science museums increasingly see as part of their mission increasing the public’s understanding of the

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Greg Brown

Vice President,Content Development

Tech Museum of InnovationSan Jose, California

Q. How is your design work in the museum similar to your former role as a practicing engineer? A. Creating an interactive exhibit is much like producing any other consumer product: the finished piece needs to be user-friendly, functional, maintainable, etc. All the same engineering processes apply. All the same attention is paid to budgets, schedules, and performance specifications. Like the best products, the best exhibits are the result of creative thinking, careful prototyping, and innovative construction. It takes a combination of science education and engineering talent to produce a world class learning experience

Figure 4-2. An Interview with Greg Brown

scientific and technical issues around them, such as global warming, sources of energy ranging from hydroelectric and solar power to nuclear power plants, management of water resources, or other issues. The public tends to highly trust the validity of the information they receive from science museums. The public understanding of engineering (a type of public understanding of research) can extend beyond being acquainted with facts about engineering issues. The public can also come to understand the engineering thought process. The essence of the way civil engineers think and work is that it is a mental discipline based on problem solving in a logical yet creative manner. Pure scientists can be successful if they disprove a hypothesis or raise a new question; an engineer is only successful when he or she delivers a useful final result or solves a problem. Every bridge that you have ever driven across started out as an engineer’s concept of how to get vehicles from point A on one side of the river, interstate highway, or

canyon, over to point B on the other side. That problem is solved only when the bridge is completed. This process involves choosing from among dozens of seemingly reasonable alternatives – steel versus reinforced concrete or reinforced concrete versus prestressed concrete, one span with no columns between supports versus two spans with columns in the middle. The overall structural form may be a truss with its triangulated struts, a straight beam, the curved arch, or the suspension bridge. Costs in terms of initial construction costs, maintenance costs, and environmental costs, are considered. Sketching, brief mathematical calculations, understanding how the bridge of a given design will behave based on engineering experience, all take place in the engineer’s mind. A calculation may be done “by computer,” but the computer and its software are merely following instructions from the engineer and

mimicking what the person would take longer to do by hand. The steps by which the structure will be constructed must be imagined, since often the time spent and transportation involved with assembling the construction are major concerns. As the design evolves, analysis methods that are essentially applied physics and mathematics refined for specialized use in civil engineering are used to calculate precise loads on the bridge and to design it to

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have the necessary strength and stiffness. This is usually the most heavily computerized step. A code or standard, or performance goals that exceed the code, set the rules for determining whether the final design is adequate. Figure 4-2 and Figure 4-3 provide first-hand insights by engineers into this process. Thus, while the general public may not realize that there is a difference between engineering design and engineering analysis, the two are distinct. To design is to propose, to make a statement; to analyze is to test the proposition, to break apart the statement and verify each part of it. The two processes work back and forth in an engineer’s mind as a project progresses. This is tracked by iterative design/analysis steps, leading to the discard of some design decisions and selection of others, eventually resulting in the final design to be built. The public understanding of engineering requires an understanding of this thought process. At the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, an exhibit has involved the visitor in the design process by having them first use computer-aided software on a computer to lay out a roller coaster, and then quickly see simulations. Making the track too steep in a particular place may mean that the car has insufficient momentum to make it over the top of the next hill, leading to iterations of adjustment to the geometry. The final saved version of the computer design is then conveyed to an adjacent part of the exhibit where the visitor sits to receive a simulated ride on their creation. This is very much in keeping with the iterative process of civil engineering thinking. In the “Green by Design” exhibition at The Tech Museum of Innovation, visitors use an iterative process to come up with their best designs for a wind turbine. (See Figure 4-4.) They select the type and number of blades to place on their turbine, assemble it, and place it in a wind tunnel for testing. An electronic read-out tells them how fast their propeller is spinning. At this point, curious visitors usually alter their designs by changing the style of blades, or adding/removing blades. When they test their devices again, they quickly see if they have improved their ability to capture wind energy. Often, visitors are surprised to discover that turbines with fewer blades can be more efficient that ones with many blades (at least when the wind speed is above some minimum level). This test/re-test approach is very much in keeping with the iterative process of civil engineering.

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Figure 4-3. An interview with Professor Anthony Ingraffea on the Tech City exhibit at the Sciencenter, Ithaca, New York

Q. When you collaborated with the Sciencenter, what was

the original concept?

A. The Tech City concept evolved from our desire to put museum participants, both children and adults, in the position of making design decisions under constraint. Voters and taxpayers always want perfect roads, safe dams, earthquake-proof buildings, but they don't always appreciate the economic, political, technical, or aesthetic boundaries engineers work within in their designs. We wanted a multifaceted exhibit in which each "engineering" experience was viewed as a series of broader decisions under such constraints, each decision guiding a part of the construction process.

Q. So it was about how engineers make decisions, not just about the things they design that we end up seeing in our daily life?

A. Yes, communicating the engineering thought process

was an important goal. Engineering design and construction is full of choices, but almost never free choices. We wanted to engage the visitor in the intriguing process of decision-making under constraint. We wanted participants to come away from the exhibit understanding that "engineering" happens in many ways and locations in their communities that are not always thought of as engineering venues. We wanted them to drive home with a conversation in the car like: "So that's why it took so long to rebuild that bridge!"

Q. How can science exhibits connect a technical topic with broader societal considerations? A. A good way to present engineering in a science exhibit is, to put it ironically, to make it a “not-

all-science” science exhibit. In other words, include the considerations that extend outside the realm of pure science and engineering. Get across the idea that engineers deal with many social, environmental, and economic constraints to their decisions and designs. An exhibit that displays Newton's and Faraday's laws might be interesting, but couple it to what your local government or utility should do about wind mills as electrical generators. Connect up the thought process from forces transferred from the wind to the propellers, to the rotation of the generator and the production of electricity, and then explore the costs and benefits of wind generation as compared to other sources of energy. Then we have engineering in a societal context, and we have broadened the appeal of such an exhibit.

Q. Who did you have in mind as your audience for Tech City? Young people of perhaps elementary or middle school age?

A. Yes, but not just young persons. We envisioned a dad and a daughter debating how best to

construct a dam with limited materials, or two college-age English majors trying to build a beautiful building that could survive a ride on a shake table. It’s possible to design an exhibit that appeals to a wide range of visitors.

Tony Ingraffea Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering,

Cornell University

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Figure 4-4. Children testing their wind turbines at the Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, California. An automated system snaps a photo of each design, so visitors can compare their results later.

photo: Tech Museum

A basic goal of the Koshland Museum in Washington D.C. is to present to the visitor current research by the National Academy of Sciences. The subject matter scope of the museum is therefore very broad, and civil engineering is only one of many topics dealt with by the Academy. An example of the way the museum acquaints its visitors with current research is the way it has developed exhibits on the basis of recently published NAS documents on climate change. Exhibit designers translate the content that is summarized in scientific consensus documents produced by the Academy into exhibits in the museum. What may be graphs on pages of scientific reports are converted into a room-long interactive time line, in which the visitor can move what is in effect a giant cursor over the display and see the global color pattern of predicted future temperatures change over the decades. Visitors can interact with a computer-administered poll on climate change that contributes public polling data for use by researchers, for example exploring what costs or changes in life style might be considered acceptable to reduce global warming. The Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco has installed large screen TV monitors with satellite communications allowing visitors to ask questions of researchers in the field and to see and hear the answers almost instantaneously. Several science museums offer “ask the scientist” or “ask the expert” features on their websites where web visitors can ask questions on particular topics. These are all ways to connect the visitor with current research.

One of the basic justifications for a science museum to spend resources on this objective of letting the public better understand engineering is that in a democratic society, the knowledge and opinions of ordinary people make a difference in the running of the government and the society. Engineering is all around them and affects them, and in turn their economic and political choices affect engineering and ultimately what does or does not get built, or how it gets built.

Preservation of Civil Engineering History One of the functions of many museums is to preserve the history of a field, such as the art museum that provides permanent homes for works of art from various eras, the archives that preserve rare books, the history museum that maintains a collection of artifacts and documents from the past. In the case of civil engineering, this can also be a worthy goal,

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though it is rare in practice. The typical science museum must serve an audience – in financial terms a market – and this is most commonly young people under twelve years of age with accompanying adults. This audience or market may be little interested in preservation of civilization’s technological advances throughout history, while they may be greatly attracted to current trends in what is new and high-tech. Preservation is often an under-rated objective, simply because many artifacts, photographs, documents, and other civil engineering items of today pertain to what at the moment seems plentiful and ordinary. The ubiquitous can be overlooked as important aspects of civil engineering history. Today, a tall building is under construction in a city; next year or within a few years there will probably be several more under construction. However, the engineering of those tall buildings changes over time. Only in the relatively uncommon museum, such as the Skyscraper Museum in New York, is such curatorial care taken so as to preserve and present this history. The civil engineering of the past may be dismissed as obsolete. If we don’t design and build it that way today, why bother to preserve and study it? Thus, the history of civil engineering, and related fields such as architecture, is often taken for granted.

One way to preserve the history of civil engineering is to preserve its actual construction artifacts. This can be done at the scale of the actual construction, such as in Meiji-Mura Museum of Japan, a large tract of land outside Tokyo where complete buildings from the Meiji (1868-1912) era have been relocated and preserved, such as a railroad machine shop; the Shin-Ohashi steel truss bridge formerly spanning the Sumida River in Tokyo; and the Shinagawa Lighthouse. See Figure 4-5. Models (see Figure 4-6) are a convenient way to preserve large-scale civil engineering works, such as the defensive canals and walls surrounding the city of Geneva, Switzerland as of the 1800s just before they were dismantled and the city expanded. The detailed model fills a large room, and walking around the model provides the visitor with an active experience of what the city used to be like.

Figure 4-5. Portion of Imperial Hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright, moved from Tokyo to Meiji Mura and re-assembled.

photo: Cornell University

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Other kinds of artifacts and documentation include the tools of the profession. For example, today’s engineers draft their drawings on the computer using computer-aided design and drafting software, and sets of construction drawings are printed out in engineering offices on large-format ink printers, much the way a document is now written on a computer using word-processing software and a paper copy made on a desktop printer. Within the lifetime of today’s older civil engineers, however, drafting was done by hand, using tools such as ruling pens with ink loaded via an eye dropper, linen drawing sheets, T-square and later parallel rule, and blue-printing (in which the dark pen or pencil lines on the original held back the light that went through and exposed the paper, making it turn dark, resulting in white lines and printing on a blue background). Engineers used slide rules until the late 1970s, when affordable hand-held electronic calculators became available. One of the unusual and valuable exhibitions on this topic, which presented the actual drawing tools formerly used by architects, and by some engineers, was the one presented in 2005.at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, “Tools of the Imagination,” curated by Professor Susan Piedmont-Palladino of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Personal computers of the earliest (circa 1980) vintage are only distantly related to today’s computers in terms of speed and capacity, and even that recent history is seldom preserved or noted, except at places such as the Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, or the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. To the historian, these preserved resources are precious, not obsolete.

Figure 4-6. Model of Geneva, Switzerland. This precise scale model in the Maison Tavel museum in Geneva shows the old town center. Demolition of the defensive canals and bridges to allow expansion of the city in the mid-1800s makes this model a unique replica of the way this city formerly was. Each miniature building was crafted out of metal to model an actual building. photo: RR

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Civil engineering historical preservation activities that may occur under the auspices of a science museum or other museum can be collections that preserve correspondence, oral histories, drawings, photos, and similar documentation for historians to draw upon, as well as objects or artifacts. Such resources have been used in writing accounts of particular engineering projects such as the Golden Gate Bridge (Van Der Zee 1986), entire eras and regions such as construction in the USA from colonial times onward (Condit 1968), key engineers and technological innovations that have affected American history (Billington 1996), and studies of individuals, such as biographical sketches of notable civil engineers (Weingardt 2005).

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Chapter 5 Demographic Considerations

Demographic Aspects of the Civil Engineering Profession The size of the science and engineering workforce in the United States ranges between five million and twenty-one million, depending on which definitions are used (NSB, 2008). For example, teachers, writers, salespeople, financial managers, and legal consultants may be trained in the sciences or engineering and use that background in their jobs, but may not necessarily classify themselves as part of the science and engineering workforce. Similarly, a science or engineering manager might report R&D (research and development) rather than scientist as a vocational classification. Alternatively, someone might be doing work that requires engineering knowledge and actually be called an engineer, but not have a degree in engineering. Criteria such as occupation title, knowledge needed to perform work, highest or most recent degree earned, or overall education all may be considered in developing statistics. Therefore, the statistics vary depending on the source. Although the scientists and engineers make up only a small portion of the total American workforce (3% to 14%), they have a disproportionate impact on economic growth and technological innovation. A reflection of this impact is that during the last half-century (1950-2000) jobs in science and engineering increased 25-fold (NSB, 2008). This trend is expected to continue. Projections for the period 2004-2014 indicate that, with 26% growth, jobs in science and engineering will increase twice as fast as jobs in other sectors (Table 5-1). During this period civil engineering jobs (excluding environmental engineering) are projected to have a 17% growth. Environmental engineering is expected to have the largest relative increase (30%), resulting in about 15,000 new jobs (NSB, 2008). With current attention to global climate change, it is possible environmental engineering growth will exceed these projections.

Table 5-1. Science and engineering Jobs 2004, and projected 2014 (NSB, 2008)

(Numbers in thousands of jobs) 2004 2014 % Change Total, all occupations 145,612 164,540 13% All Science and Engineering occupations 5,120 6,440 26% Scientists 3,652 4,773 31% Life scientists 232 280 21% Computer and mathematical occupations 2,698 3,656 36% Physical scientists 250 281 12% Social scientists 492 580 18% Engineers 1,449 1,644 13% Civil Engineers 237 276 17% Environmental Engineers 49 64 30%

Table 5-2 provides similar data to that in Table 5-1, but only for nonacademic science and engineering employment.

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Figure 5-1. College-educated women and ethnic minorities in nonacademic science and engineering occupations (NSB, 2008)

1980 1990 2000 Total 1,413,000 2,459,000 3,664,000 Engineers 853,000 1,295,000 1,623,000 Life Scientists 83,000 119,000 181,000 Math/Computer Scientists 177,000 495,000 1,280,000 Physical Scientists 143,000 219,000 259,000 Social Scientists 158,000 332,000 318,000

According to the National Science Board (2002) the United States is trailing many developed countries with only 4% to 6% of students earning undergraduate degrees in science and technology. Increasingly, the gap between available jobs and qualified professionals to fill them is being closed by foreign-born engineers and scientists. United States science and engineering workforce statistics indicate that in 1999, 10% of those holding baccalaureate degrees, 20% with masters degrees, and more than 25% of doctorate holders were born abroad. The percentages may be much higher in some engineering and computer science fields. Furthermore, immigration trends suggest that these figures may be even higher in 2007 (NSB, 2002). The demographics of the science and engineering workforce are changing, but they do not reflect either the overall demographics of the US nor the college-educated population. Women, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans continue to be significantly underrepresented in the science and engineering workforce. As can be seen in Figure 5-1, the representation of women and minorities has increased since 1980, but progress has been slow.

For example, results from the American Community Survey indicate that in 2005:

• Women were 25.8% of the science and engineering workforce but 47.2% of the college-degreed workforce and 51% of the U.S. population.

• Blacks were 5.1% of that workforce but 7.5% of the college-degreed workforce and 12% of the U.S. population.

• Hispanics were 5.2% of that workforce but 5.8% of the college-degreed workforce and 14% of the U.S. population. (NSB, 2008)

The story is even bleaker when we look at undergraduates seeking degrees in engineering. In 2005, 17.2 % of undergraduate engineering students were women. This is a decrease from 1995 when 18.5% were women. Similarly the percentage of black students seeking

Table 5-2. College graduates in the USA in nonacademic science and engineering occupations (NSB 2002)

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Figure 5-2. Minority undergraduate engineering students, by race/ethnicity: 1995–2005 (NSF, 2004)

undergraduate engineering degrees decreased from 7.0% in 1995 to 5.9% in 2005 (NSF, 2004). Figure 5-2 shows trends in minority engineering undergraduate enrollments from 1995 to 2005. Hispanics are the only group that experienced a slight increase in representation during the study period.

According to data collected by NSF (2004), 26.9% of students who report disabilities choose undergraduate majors in science and engineering fields. This percentage is almost the same as that for students without disabilities, as shown in Table 5-3. When broken out by sub-discipline, using students without disabilities as a baseline, we see a slightly higher percentage of students with disabilities choosing computer science and social science, and a slightly lower percentage choosing engineering.

According to an NRC study (2006), universities have developed a number of successful strategies to recruit and retain women students and faculty. Perhaps most relevant to science museums is the recommendation to enhance female student recruitment by “extend[ing] outreach to potential students at both the K-12 and undergraduate levels. Such outreach might take the form of summer science and engineering camps, lecture series, career days, collaborative research projects, and support for K-12 teachers.” Note also that the science museum is well-placed to provide this early outreach. This and other studies (Rochefort et al., 2004) indicate that women choose science and engineering undergraduate majors less than men for a variety of reasons ranging from high school preparation in math and science, to lack of self confidence, to perceptions about science and engineering as male professions, engineers as “nerds,” engineers being portrayed as perpetrators of destruction, glass ceilings, and discrimination or harassment. Many women tend to choose careers that they perceive are helping society or improving quality of life. This may be why women have higher representation in environmental, chemical, and industrial engineering. Women are less likely to take higher levels of mathematics in high school, and often limit their science to chemistry and biology. Men are more likely to take math earlier in their high school careers and to include physics in their choice of science classes. This makes them more ready to jump into

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Table 5-3. Major field of study of undergraduates, by disability status: 2004 (NSF, 2004)

science and engineering majors in college. Physics is the high school subject most related to civil engineering. Some women’s negative perceptions about science and engineering careers may lead them to choose what they perceive to be preferable career paths.

Major field of study All undergraduates

No disability

With disability

All fields (number) 19,054,000 16,897,500 2,156,400 Percent distribution All fields 100.0 100.0 100.0

Business/management 19.8 20.0 18.7 Education 8.5 8.6 8.1 Health 16.4 16.4 15.7 Humanities 13.2 13.1 13.8 Science and Engineering 26.7 26.7 26.9

Computer/information sciences 6.2 6.1 7.2 Engineering 5.3 5.4 4.5 Life sciences 4.9 4.9 4.7 Mathematics 0.6 0.6 0.4 Physical sciences 0.8 0.8 0.7 Social/behavioral sciences 8.9 8.8 9.3

Other 15.4 15.2 16.9

Student exposure to science and engineering concepts is a key factor in developing interest in and a positive attitude about these career paths (Rochefort et al., 2004). The NRC study (2006) examined four higher education institutions that have been successful in recruiting women and found that a success factor was implementing intervention programs at all levels. These universities have worked with schools to improve teacher preparation as well as science and math curricula. They have developed outreach programs to schools to introduce children to interesting career opportunities at a young age or to involve high school students in research. Once female students arrive on campus, these universities have created a welcoming environment by clustering science and engineering women in the residence halls, establishing mentoring networks, providing opportunities for students to collaborate and work in teams, and creating task forces to evaluate progress in improving campus gender climate. Universities have found that programs that are effective in recruiting women are also effective in recruiting other underrepresented students. Certainly museums can, and do, try to portray scientists and engineers as men and women who come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, and devote selected exhibits to showcasing engineers and scientists of nontraditional backgrounds. In doing more, science museums could play an active role in the K-12 outreach and teacher preparation realm. This could be done as stand-alone programs or in partnerships with regional universities. Programs could

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include summer institutes for teachers, after-school programs, workshops or summer camps for students, tech challenges (e.g., design contests), lecture series, student involvement in applied research projects, or development of kits to complement curriculum, similar to the FOSS kits developed by Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California. Programs that involve students in the development or maintenance of museum displays would provide an engaging experience for students to apply science and engineering concepts, and would benefit the museum with volunteer labor.

Demographic Aspects of Visitors of Science Museums Age Level Age level of a visitor is one of the most important demographic characteristics of a science museum’s visitors. For example, consider a museum that caters primarily to children of elementary school age or even younger. From that simple demographic fact flows many of the requirements that would be placed on any potential exhibit or other activity. Parents, grandparents, teachers, or adult caregivers bring young children to a children’s museum, which of course raises the challenge of making the offerings entertaining and accessible to the young – not going “over their heads” – while also avoiding “going under the heads” of the adults. An exhibit that can be all things to all people, accessible to the toddler, yet interesting to older visitors all the way through to the well-educated adult, is perhaps the highest objective, but some objectives are more important than others, and a museum catering specifically to pre-K ages has its own priorities. Hands-on exhibits that attract the visitor with the fun experience of trying things out are especially desirable for young visitors (e.g., elementary school age). See Figure 5-3, an example of an exhibit design intended to engage the young visitor in experimenting with what structural engineers sometimes employ in the real world – using vibration-isolating bearings under a building or bridge to reduce the severity of earthquake motions. An exhibit designer or evaluator approaching this task would be wise to think of it from the child’s point of view. This begins literally with the eye level of the young person, which is quite different vis-à-vis a close-up object as compared to the eye level of an adult. Features of the exhibit that allow the child to express his or her innate playfulness should be sought. If the child has no interest to play with the exhibit, the best of intentions to provide an enriching engineering experience may be fruitless. Such exhibits may provide amusement and learning for the adult as well, but they are often considered essential for the younger audience. The fact that young fingers (and feet!) may probe, push, and climb on an exhibit has significant design implications related to safety and durability, as discussed later. If a child can climb on an exhibit, one of them eventually will. While associated printed explanatory material is often included with hands-on exhibits, the design goal in its purist form is to make the exhibit self-explanatory: The child walks up to it, is curious as to how it works, and without further ado begins to interact with it, discover, and learn.

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illustration: RR

STEP 1: stimulate curiosity, attract interest

STEP 2: make it obvious how to interact with the exhibit, with as little text as possible

STEP 4: A decisive result of the experiment (and preferably a result where something collapses!). Safety considerations (e.g. lightweight foam collapsing building in this case), as well as durability, are especially important for younger visitors.

?

Rolling shake table platform moves back and forth

STEP 3: Visitor engages with (plays with) the exhibit in various ways and achieves an insight. (In this case, the foam rubber building model on earthquake isolators shakes less than the one rigidly mounted to the “ground.”)

Figure 5-3. Example of an age-appropriate exhibit (elementary-school age): an experiment tosimulate how a building responds to an earthquake with and without seismic isolators

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When not otherwise specified, a general-purpose science museum may assume an age level of ten years old in designing exhibits for visitors. Written material and exhibits that are well presented for that age level can often be made engaging for older ages as well. In the example of this exhibit, one can well imagine that it could be a fun and educational experience for the older visitor, and that without detracting from the features that make it appealing to the very young. For example, there might be variables such as adding or subtracting weights, changing the stiffness of the models, or reading a nearby display board with more technical information, that an older visitor might appreciate. In the attempt to provide more detailed content that cannot be conveyed in a hands-on exhibit, civil engineers can work with museum staff and educators to develop graphic or text products for in-person visitors or for teachers and students to access and use in the classroom, or that internet “visitors” of the museum can access over the museum’s website. This provides a way for the exhibit to provide more in-depth learning. The goal of the exhibit, however, should be to appeal to the visitor even if the web is never employed. In some cases, learning about civil engineering has a prerequisite that is age-related or education-related. For example, there are various levels of understanding of the lever principle. For a person to learn the mathematics about the lever principle of Archimedes as applied to the analysis of a cantilever beam (a beam supported only at one end, like a diving board) and how much bending its support must resist, a little algebra must be employed. Following the motto, “if the shoe fits, wear it,” it would be necessary to design such an exhibit to the age level that has this background. Middle school math could be made interesting via such an exhibit, while for the younger audience it would usually be inappropriate to try to convey the way levers work in civil engineering via equations. One might also use the simple case of a cantilever beam for younger ages. The structural engineer would call the tendency for downward rotation of the cantilever beam a result of a “bending moment,” but that terminology need not get in the way of a basic understanding. Younger visitors might see how the beam bends or deflects more as more weight is placed at the tip; a middle school visitor might understand the equation M = PL, where M is the maximum bending (technically the “bending moment”), P is the weight placed at the tip, and L is the length the cantilever extends from the support. For an older age level with more background, it is possible to go from the example of the cantilever beam to the analysis of a beam supported at both ends, (picture the balance beam on which a gymnast performs). This case would be defined by the structural engineer as a “simply supported beam.” The motivated high school student would be able to use mathematics to solve some problems of this type, needing only their algebra and geometry as the mathematical foundation. This young person could understand the application of the lever principle in civil engineering at a deeper level. Picture yourself in a museum devoted to a subject you know nothing about, say a museum devoted to symphonic music and assume that your knowledge of that music is limited to the fact that you have only occasionally attended such an event. You would be a frustrated museum visitor if the exhibit immediately plunged you into the fine points of the orchestra’s

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instruments, such as the distinction between the alto and soprano clarinet, or assumed you know how to read music and understand a large vocabulary of terms such as timbre, cadenza, arpeggio, etc. By contrast, an exhibit that let you advance from your beginning musical background to a higher level would be appreciated. Meanwhile, another visitor with great experience in this field, perhaps a child in the local youth symphony, is ready to explore the subject at a more complex level. In this example, level of background is not the same as age level, and one should be careful not to generalize too much about the backgrounds of particular ages. Gender As noted earlier in this chapter, there is a lack of girls taking science and math courses in school, and later there is under-representation of women in college in taking science, math, or engineering courses. That in turn results in under-representation of women in some of the sciences and in engineering, a deficit that both educators and museums are working to overcome. Special efforts that encourage girls to explore science and engineering and manage to do so without excluding boys are widely considered to be a valid public goal that extends to many areas, including museums. It may be that the exhibit itself need not be tailored to be girl-specific but that the social context in which the girls interact with the exhibit needs to be given some thought. If boys in a field trip to a museum are more likely to be rambunctious or gather around an exciting exhibit such as is pictured in Figure 5-2, for example, they may end up crowding out the girls. Lesser use of the exhibit by girls would be indicative of this fact rather than any defect in the exhibit itself. It might point to the need for separate use of the exhibit by girls when they visit in field trips, assigning turns to students, or using a boy-girl team in which the girl is the one who gets to yank on the handle and run the experiment. The mathematics learned by girls is identical to that learned by boys – π is 3.1416 regardless of who does the math – but teachers have successfully experimented with different social settings in which girls learn math more effectively or achieve a more positive attitude toward the subject. Similarly, a gender-neutral exhibit may still require thought as to how boys and girls will differently interact with it. At an adult level, an evaluator should be able to provide information on whether women and men would on average have different life experiences they bring to an engineering exhibit. For example, if men were found to typically have more familiarity with power tools, and if the interface with an exhibit used hand-held devices that were similar to power tools, some thought should be given to how to make the exhibit inviting, regardless of this background. Race and Ethnicity For approximately half a century in the USA, reaching out to particular racial or ethnic groups has commonly been a goal of science museums, as it has in education and society at large. The present ethnic or racial mix of visitors to a science museum may not be the same as the museum’s desired mix of visitors, and hence museum outreach plans as well as visitor studies of the museum’s current visitors are relevant. The usual aim of a museum is to have roughly proportional participation in the museum’s activities to that of the region’s population. Engineers working with a science museum should become familiar with specific outreach efforts of the museum. For example, targeting particular schools in a school district for teacher outreach efforts might be indicated.

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Ethnicity is a slightly more complex issue than race, because it includes language, discussed separately. Ethnicity can also involve differing familiarity with the built environment. For example, housing construction tends to vary greatly around the globe. Recent immigrants to the USA may be familiar with some kinds of construction and quite unfamiliar with others. A person who has grown up in America probably knows what a two-by-four is, but this is not common around the globe. Ethnicity of recent immigrants to the United States can also be associated with varying levels of scientific background. For example, in some countries, school-age people have more science and math capability than their American counterparts, while in other countries, the opposite is true. Language Dealing with multiple languages entails extra translation cost, takes up space (e.g., if there are several sets of text next to each other on a printed display), and can complicate an otherwise simple and elegant graphic design. But if a facility serves enough visitors who do not speak English, efforts to provide multi-lingual access is desirable. The need for multi-lingual text or audio can arise when a significant portion of a community in the USA is composed of recent immigrants without English capability. It can also apply when a facility draws international visitors and desires to be a truly international resource. Information cards printed in various languages can be produced for use by visitors. Visitors picks up the cards that have information in their particular language and carry it with them, or access one in each exhibit area. One technological device often used in art museums is the hand-held audio devices that can be set to play in various languages. Translation of web-provided or computer-provided resources is another aspect to making content accessible, which, although it entails extra cost, in effect takes up no space. On the web, an entire set of pages in a different language can be accessed with a click, whereas on the printed display board each language takes up space. The engineer collaborating with a science museum on an exhibit would typically rely on the museum staff to deal with the language issue and decide at the initiation of the project if multi-lingual text will be included and if so, how. Disabilities The wheel chair is the image that may most often come to mind in thinking about disabilities. Detailed requirements and design guidelines are available, for example ADA (2008). Only a few highlights follow, to emphasize the fact that disabilities should be considered at the outset of exhibit design. The requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA 2008) have been vigorously advanced by agencies and advocates of the disabled, with the result that today it is even possible for lawsuits to be a fact of life for non-complying institutions, which increases the importance of consideration of disabilities. Wheel chair access involves gentle ramp slopes (not steeper than 1:12, that is, one unit of elevation change for 12 units of horizontal run, or 8 1/3%, or a little less than an angle of 5 degrees) and protection against drop-offs. Also required are adequate widths of doorways (minimum 3 feet or approximately a meter) and spaces between exhibits. Protection from sharp or hot objects at knee height is another design factor (picture the insulation around pipes under the sink in restrooms). Controls for an exhibit should be placed low enough for a person seated in a wheelchair to operate them (picture the way buttons are arranged in an elevator).

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Sight impairment, including poor vision or complete blindness, brings into play the way the floor is used to signal what the person is about to encounter. Curbs or cabinetry extending down to floor level allow the cane of a blind person to tap into it and indicate what is there, while a shape like a typical table does not gives the person a floor-level clue they are about to run into an object. Raised-dot floor texture can signal changes to the bland person, as are used at traffic intersections. Braille versions of printed text can be offered, and audio hand-held devices are another option. Three-dimensional “braille” versions of an exhibit are also possible, that is, the construction of a three-dimensional touchable model that can convey the same information a seeing person could obtain, as is illustrated later in Chapter 7 (see Figure 7-2). Hearing impairment relates to any auditory features of an exhibit, and the designer can try to devise ways to provide the same information or experience a different way. For example, a sound that gets louder to indicate that the weight on a model is increasing and that stress is rising, or that the flow of water is speeding up, could have an analogous interface using a hand-touched pad that increases in vibration intensity. As with language accessibility issues, the engineer collaborating with a museum would rely on the museum staff to be knowledgeable about these disability access issues and provide input on any relevant exhibit design decisions.

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Chapter 6 Vignettes of Exhibits and Other Offerings This chapter is not an all-inclusive survey of exhibits and other offerings of science museums that treat civil engineering themes, but rather a wide-ranging array of examples. The intent is to illustrate the broad spectrum of such exhibits and venues to inspire designs that explore further, rather than to attempt to catalog all the interesting and valid ways of presenting civil engineering in science museums. Some of the institutions included here are dedicated to the purpose of public science education in a building called a science museum or science center. Others are visitor centers or temporary exhibits installed in public places. Not included here is the vast quantity of public information provided via the worldwide web, though websites associated with exhibits and other offerings within the above-described scope are listed here so that the reader may obtain further information. For each entry here, general information about the organization or facility is provided, such as contact information, along with a selected example of an exhibit or other offering featuring civil engineering. The photos or other images on a given page are those of the particular organization that is described unless otherwise credited. A visit to an interior design gallery might stimulate ideas as to how you would like to remodel a kitchen, even if you won’t be exactly copying what is presented in a showroom. Music composers through the ages have listened to the music designed and performed by others and found inspiration to create their own unique contributions. Students in composition classes in English departments study literature to improve their own style. Similarly, we hope the examples here will be both instructive in their particulars and inspiring in their diversity. The possibilities to be realized in the future greatly outnumber those that have already been realized.

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American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Reston, Virginia

Type of Institution The American Society of Civil Engineers is a professional association founded in 1852, which has grown from a national organization to an international one, with over 112,000 members. Aside from services provided to its engineer members, the organization’s outreach efforts include educating the public about the role of the civil engineer and encouraging the development of the next generation of civil engineers. Contact Information ASCE 1801 Alexander Bell Drive Reston, VA 20191-4400 Tel.: (202) 789-2200. Website(s) http://www.asce.org Exhibit or Activity: Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America Description To commemorate its 150th anniversary in 2002, ASCE produced a series of related exhibitions and programs, “Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America.” The outreach effort explored the relationship of the public to the civil engineering networks that define modern life. “Ask the Infrastructure” was a companion traveling exhibit to “Me, Myself and Infrastructure” that provided explorations of six key questions behind ASCE's yearlong outreach, namely:

These six questions were presented in three-dimensional columns that encourage viewers to revisit the meaning of infrastructure. Narratives, drawn from all parts of the country, explored these questions and examined the impact of civil engineers in daily life. There is also a companion guide available for sale.

Who's Responsible? Is it Safe? Is it Available? How Much Does it Cost? How Big is It? How Long Will it Last?

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Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum Ann Arbor, Michigan

Type of Institution The Ann Arbor Hands On Museum features interactive exhibits, as its name indicates. It started in 1982 with 25 exhibits. It has expanded its facilities and educational programs and now has over 250 interactive exhibits. The museum tackles the challenge of translating into forms understandable by young visitors serious scientific principles, for example, Bernoulli’s principle (which mathematically describes how the pressure of a fluid decreases as its speed increases). Contact Information Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum 220 E. Ann Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104 Tel.: (734) 995-5439 Website(s) http://www.aahom.org/ Exhibit or Activity: National Engineering Week Description A special event was held to coincide with National Engineering Week, Feb. 18 – 22, 2008.

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B&O Railroad Museum Baltimore, Maryland

Type of Institution The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum is the oldest, most comprehensive American railroad collection. The subject of locomotives and railcars are more within the discipline of mechanical engineering than civil engineering, and in fact, historically the rise of the railroad was one of the chief reasons why the two engineering disciplines split and specialized. However, the development of railroads has entailed construction of significant civil engineering works, such as bridges, and this major railroad museum is included here to indicate that connection. The B & O Railroad Museum, like many railroad museums, is an example of a type of museum that is not primarily devoted to civil engineering but is an ideal venue for providing selected content on that subject. Contact Information The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum 901 W. Pratt Street Baltimore, MD 21223 Tel.: (410) 752-2490 Website(s) http://www.borail.org http://www.borail.org/roundhouse-collapse-rebuild.shtml Exhibit or Activity: Roundhouse Collapse and Rebuild Description On February 17, 2003, the Iron Structure of the 1884 Baldwin Roundhouse collapsed under the weight of snow, which had accumulated from a storm. The website documents through photos and notes the rebuilding process, which took over one and a half years to complete.

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California Science Center Los Angeles, California

Type of Institution The California Science Center (formerly the California Museum of Science and Industry) is the largest hands-on science center on the West Coast. Operated by the state of California, it is located in Exposition Park, across the street from the University of Southern California. Contact Information California Science Center Exposition Park, 700 State Drive Los Angeles, CA 90037 Tel.: (213) 744-7421 Website(s) http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Exhibits/CreativeWorld/Structures/Structures.php Exhibit or Activity: Structures Description Within the exhibit area Creative World, is a section on Structures, which examines the science behind construction and explores how structures are built. Exhibits include a mini shake table where the visitor can build their own structures and see if they would stand up to the test of an earthquake, and the Earthquake Experience where the visitor can feel the shaking of an earthquake—and learn how to prepare for a real one.

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Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose San Jose, California

Type of Institution Located in downtown San Jose, California, this museum serves younger visitors as its name implies, along with the adults who accompany them. Within walking distance is the Tech Museum, serving primarily middle-school-age youth on up, which provides a convenient blend of services for residents in the area. Contact information Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose 180 Woz Way San Jose, CA 95110 Tel.: (408) 298-5437 Email: contactus@cdm.org Website(s) http://www.cdm.org Exhibit or Activity: WaterWays Description WaterWays is a large exhibit featuring, as its name indicates, lots of water – water that gushes, rushes, flows, swirls, and which has brightly colored plastic balls that make movement of the fluid visible. Children use the balls at several stations in the exhibit, in the Bell Fountain, Vortex Tank, Laminar Jet, Current Channel, and Ballcano. A visitor’s own unique water fountain can be devised at the Waterfall Wall. The experience of getting the hands wet and being splashed a little adds to the fun of the exhibit and makes it more memorable. In the world of civil engineering, the phenomenon being learned about would be called fluid dynamics. In actual engineering laboratories, called hydraulic modeling laboratories, similar experiments are run.

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Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering - Richmond, CA

Type of Institution CUREE, Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, is a non-profit organization with two dozen university members and 280 individual civil engineering faculty members. In addition to organizing large engineering research projects, the organization has mounted several engineering exhibits. Themes include earthquake engineering and more broadly structural and geotechnical engineering. Contact Information CUREE 1301 S. 46th Street Richmond, CA 94804 Tel.: (510) 665-3529 Email: curee@curee.org Website(s) http://www.curee.org http://www.curee.org/projects/ce-museums/SF_exhibit/ Exhibit or Activity: “Earthquake Engineering” Description The exhibit was sponsored by the City of San Francisco, Department of Building Inspection, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of April 18, 1906. The exhibit was installed in a 1,000 sq ft (93 sq m) tent in a pedestrian plaza on Market Street, the busiest street in

San Francisco. Within the same tent was an original one-room emergency housing cabin erected after the 1906 earthquake, a display provided by the Western Neighborhoods Project. The electronic version of the printed exhibit guide may be accessed at: http://www.curee.org/projects/ce-museums/SF_exhibit/.

A model of a tall building on a shake table continuously swayed back and forth each day, inviting pedestrians to take a closer look. The shaking severity at the roof was simultaneously displayed on the adjacent computer.

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Audience Attendance in the exhibit totaled 42,000 by the end of its one-month duration. The majority were adults who happened to be walking on Market Street, though school field trips brought elementary and middle school students as well. Budget $40,000. Some display materials were loaned free of charge by companies, such as full-scale seismic isolators and dampers used on San Francisco Bay Area bridges as seismic retrofits. The tent and electrical supply were provided by the city. Timeframe The exhibit was in place for one month, the month of April when the City of San Francisco was commemorating the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. The preparation time was three months.

Visitors operated this motorized model of the world’s largest shake table, provided by the NIED governmental agency of Japan. Pushing one button made the scale-model pistons move the table in one horizontal direction, pushing another button added another direction of motion, etc. The adjacent monitor showed actual video of tests of multi-story building.

Several full-scale cutaway models of typical house construction, with current seismic building code features highlighted, were displayed.

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Deutsches Museum Munich, Germany

Type of Institution The Deutsches Museum, with a collection of over 100,000 objects from the fields of science and technology, is one of the world’s largest science and industry museums. The collection includes objects ranging from mining to atomic physics, from the Altamira cave to biology. About a quarter of the objects are on exhibition in the main museum at a given time. Many of the exhibits are now interactive. Among its exhibits on civil engineering themes are several on bridges. Contact Information Deutsches Museum Museumsinsel 1 80538 München, Germany Tel.: (+49) 89 2179 1, Email: information@deutsches-museum.de. Website(s) http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en Exhibit or Activity: Bridges Description Working models of different types of bridges allow the visitor to put the structural components together for an arch or cantilever, apply a load and see the measured forces in various members of a truss, or slide rods through the length of a suspension bridge to change its stiffness.

Visitors can construct an arch (above) or cantilever structure (right). Associated suggested challenges or explanations are provided in multi-lingual displays.

photo: Sheri Sheppard

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Left: Visitors can slide rods through the ends of the suspension bridge deck to change the deck stiffness by interconnecting planks that extend across the bridge deck. This results in a change in load distribution and shape of the main cables. At right, a visitor can turn a dial to apply a load to this truss at midspan. Each member (segment) of the truss is instrumented with a strain-measuring instrument that indicates the force going through that member (an instrument called a “load cell”).

photo: Sheri Sheppard

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Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution Kobe, Japan

Type of Institution The Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution museum commemorates the Great Hanshin (or Kobe) Earthquake of January 17, 1995. Four stories tall, and sheathed in glass, the building is built to be extremely earthquake resistant. The museum vividly conveys what happened during the first moments of the earthquake and the weeks, months, and years that followed. English-speaking volunteers are on hand to help explain some of the museum's more technical displays. A hand's-on section helps visitors learn how construction techniques can minimize and even prevent earthquake damage and dispenses information on disaster management. Contact Information Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution 1-5-2 Kaigan-dori, Wakinohama Chuo-ku, Kobe 651-0078 Tel.: 078-262-5050. Website(s) http://www.dri.ne.jp/english/index.html Exhibit or Activity: Disaster Reduction Exhibition Description Realistic full-scale dioramas depict street scenes immediately after the earthquake, providing a safe but intense appreciation for the danger and tragedy of the disaster. While dioramas are sometimes considered old-fashioned, a diorama can be an effective way of immersing a visitor in an environment. A full-scale scene can be presented, with realistic detail and more lifelike appearance than on the flat screen of a computer. The traditional wildlife diorama, with taxidermy specimens of animals mounted in room-sized settings with a painted backdrop, date in the USA from 1889 when Carl Akeley established one at the Milwaukee Public Museum Akeley went on to establish the famous set of dioramas and associated conservation efforts at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Panero, 2007) The Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution reminds us that the diorama technique is not obsolete and can be applied to many topics.

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Exploratorium San Francisco, California

Type of Institution The Exploratorium defines itself as a “museum of science, art and human perception.” Its focus is education through hands-on interaction. There are around 400 exhibits on view. Founded in 1969, the museum is located in the Palace of Fine Arts. (A new facility is being prepared for it on Piers 15 and 17). Robert Oppenheimer, the founder, was influential in creating the key elements of the modern science center with its hands-on activities, and which seeks to be entertaining, aesthetic, refreshing, and stimulating. The museum has also been active in promoting the public understanding of science, and operates its own educational, and evaluation departments. Exhibit design and fabrication services to other institutions are also offered. Contact information Exploratorium 3601 Lyon Street San Francisco, CA 94123 Tel.: (415) 563-7337 Website(s) http://www.exploratorium.edu Exhibit or Activity: Description The Exploratorium maintains a catalogue of exhibits available for travel, several focus on engineering principals. Two examples are the Fluttering Bridge that demonstrates bridge failure, modeled after the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse and a catenary arch that demonstrates a cable structure. At right is a the “resonator” exhibit that includes information about destructive bridge vibrations.

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Field Museum Chicago, Illinois

Type of Institution The Chicago Field Museum was founded to house the biological and anthropological collections assembled for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. These objects form the core of the Museum's collections, which have grown through worldwide expeditions, exchange, purchase, and gifts to more than twenty million specimens. The collections form the foundation of the Museum's exhibition, research and education programs, which are further informed by a world-class natural history library of more than 250,000 volumes. While natural history and anthropology are featured at the Field Museum, rather than technology, selected exhibits span over into subject areas within civil engineering. Contact Information The Field Museum 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60605-2496 Tel.: (312) 922-9410 Website(s) http://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibits/traveling_uf.htm Exhibit or Activity: Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters Description From earthquakes to tsunamis, hurricanes to volcanoes, natural disasters both fascinate and frighten us. This visceral, immersive traveling exhibition explores the causes of these natural phenomena, chronicles the devastation they can bring to those in their paths, and profiles the people who are working to better predict, respond to, and prepare for such disasters.

Size Requirements: Approximately 7,000 sq. ft. Audience: Families, school groups, and adults. Appropriate for natural history museums and science centers. Availability: Available for 3-month bookings beginning in January 2009

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The exhibit presented information about earth science, engineering, and safety. It provided a global-to-local perspective of how the earth changes, and, how individuals can become active in hazard preparedness in their local communities. A hand-operated shake table, an interactive computer display, and wall displays taught the visitors about the tools and techniques of earth scientists, engineers and emergency services personnel.

photo: Jill Andrews

KidZone Hemet, California

Type of Institution The KidZone is an interactive children's museum located in Hemet, California for "hands-on" learning through exhibits that exploring math, science, technology, and the arts, and primarily aimed at elementary school age visitors. Contact Information KidZone, Riverside County Youth Museum 123 S. Carmalita St. Hemet, CA 92543 Tel.: (951) 765-1223. Website(s) http://www.kidzone.org/visit/shakezone.html Exhibit or Activity: “ShakeZone” Description This exhibit was developed and funded as a joint venture by the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), headquartered at the University of Southern California. Many of the exhibit pieces were developed under an award to CUREE called the CUREE-Caltech Woodframe Project, which involved the development of educational modules, with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided funding for the SCEC portion of the exhibit.

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Hands-on interaction was encouraged with the woodframe building models in the exhibit. Visitors could see how well houses could withstand shaking by adding and removing seismic bracing pieces in the models.

photo: Jill Andrews

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Liberty Science Center Skyscraper Exhibit Jersey City, New Jersey

Type of Institution The Liberty Science Center is an interactive science museum and learning center located in Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. The center, which opened in 1993 as New Jersey's first major state science museum, has science exhibits and the world's largest IMAX Dome theater. Contact Information Liberty Science Center Liberty State Park 222 Jersey City Boulevard Jersey City, NJ 07305 Tel.: (201) 200-1000 Website(s) http://www.lsc.org http://www.lsc.org/visit/doandsee/exhibits/skyscraper/ Exhibit or Activity: Skyscraper! Achievement and Impact Description This is the largest exhibition on the subject of skyscrapers in the world - with artifacts from the World Trade Center, a walk along an I-Beam two stories above the exhibition floor, an earthquake-shake table, and more. There are exhibits on how an elevator works, turning giant mix-and-match towers to create new designs from building parts, a chance to plan a neighborhood, and stacking blocks using electromagnetism with a crane simulator. Exhibit includes: • Soaring Structures: Explore a cityscape of large-scale images. • Wind Tunnel: Find out how buildings behave in high winds. • Walk the Steel: Wearing a safety harness, you can test your balance 18 feet in the air. • Curtain Wall Test: Tests how well a tall structure reacts in a hurricane force storm with

wind and water.

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Photos provided courtesy of the Library Science Center, Skyscraper Exhibit.

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Louisville Science Center Louisville, Kentucky

Type of Institution The Louisville Science Center is the largest hands-on science center in Kentucky, with about 150 interactive exhibits and activity stations, a four-story IMAX Theatre, teaching laboratories, a variety of educational programs, and distance learning capabilities.

Contact Information Louisville Science Center 727 West Main Street Louisville, KY 40202 Tel.: (800) 591-2203 Website(s) http://www.louisvillescience.org http://www.louisvillescience.org/site/exhibits-world-we-create/ Exhibit or Activity: “The World We Create” Description The World We Create opened in 1997. This 12,500 square-foot permanent exhibit lets visitors make use of their creative and problem-solving skills. Over 40 activity stations involving the fields of chemistry, physics, engineering, telecommunications, and manufacturing encourage visitors to discover how math, science, and technology are at work in their everyday lives. Traveling versions of The World We Create have appeared in museums across the United States.

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Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts

The Museum of Science is a major science center, with 1.6 million visitors per year. Over 400 of its exhibits are interactive. It also operates a television studio for producing podcasts and videocasts, and has an IMAX Omni theater. Planetarium. A variety of engineering disciplines have been featured in its Engineering is Elementary program (for elementary school-age children). Note below that Number 2, 3, 4,and 13 emphasize civil engineering subjects.

1. Wind & Weather: Mechanical Engineering 2. Water: Environmental Engineering 3. Earth Materials: Materials Engineering 4. Balance & Forces: Civil Engineering 5. Simple Machines: Industrial Engineering 6. Sound: Acoustical Engineering 7. Insects & Plants: Agricultural Engineering 8. Organisms: Bioengineering 9. Electricity: Electrical Engineering 10. Solids and Liquids: Chemical Engineering 11. Magnetism: Transportation Engineering 12. Plants: Package Engineering 13. Landforms: Geotechnical Engineering

For each of these branches of engineering, lesson plans, first-person stories told by a multi-cultural cast of characters, guidance for teachers on standards and training opportunities, and information for ordering materials or publications are provided. For the civil engineering subject and the theme of balance and forces, hands-on bridge building at a scale children can accomplish is featured. Frequently scheduled activities in the museum are provided in this program, funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. One of the current offerings, Aviary Architect, is a design project to design and build from simple materials a birdhouse for one of the museum’s birds to use. A similar design challenge involves a house for another kind of animal in the museum’s collection. Whirling Windmills is a design challenge to design and build Contact information Museum of Science Science Park Boston, MA 02114 Tel.: (617) 723-2500 Email: information@mos.org

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Website(s) http://www.mos.org The Museum of Science is also the home of the National Center for Technological Literacy, which provides on-line resources for teachers and museums: http://www.mos.org/nctl/. Exhibit or Activity: The Big Dig Description This exhibit about Boston's Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel project included a historic perspective, a survey of social and economical issues, and interactive exhibits on the physics and engineering of the project. Through interactive video programs, visitors learned about the people and their skills needed to engineer and construct this massive endeavor. They could also test their own ability to make decisions and handle construction issues. After the Big Dig construction project in Boston was completed, the exhibit was modified to a small scale model of the the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge.

Left: entrance to the Big Dig exhibit. Right: model of Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. photo credit: J. Ralph

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Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, Illinois

Type of Institution The museum is one of the largest science (or science and industry) museums in the world. As explained earlier, in this document we use the term “science museum” broadly to include facilities sometimes called “science centers.” When a distinction is made between the two terms, it can sometimes relate to whether the institution maintains a collection (“museum”) or only provides exhibits to current visitors. In this respect, the Museum of Science and Industry is a museum in that it has a large permanent collection documenting the development of science and technology. The fact that it has from its beginning had interactive exhibits illustrates its “science center” characteristic. The Museum’s Center for the Advancement of Science Education seeks to extend and develop the field of science education. The museum was opened in 1933 but has an interesting history extending back further. In 1911, Julius Rosenwald, chair of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, visited Munich with his son, and they greatly enjoyed the exhibits at the Deutsches Museum, with its many working models and exhibits of engineering works that could be operated by visitors. That led to his drive to establish Chicago’s own museum of science and technology. Contact Information Museum of Science and Industry 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60637 Tel.: (773) 684-1414 Website(s) http://www.msichicago.org Exhibit or Activity: Coal Mine Description The Coal Mine has been a permanent feature of the museum since it opened in 1933, and it has left a memorable impression on millions of visitors. Visitors actually descend below ground and pass through realistic room-sized representations of a working coal mine, complete with coal, loading equipment and train cars, and mining equipment.

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Museum of Science and Industry Tampa Bay, Florida

Type of Institution The scope of MOSI, as its name indicates, extends to technology or engineering as well as science. Contact Information Museum of Science and Industry 4801 E. Fowler Avenue Tampa, FL 33617 Tel.: (813) 987-6100 Website(s) http://www.mosi.org/ http://www.mosi.org/disasterville.html Exhibit or Activity: “Disasterville” Description A new permanent exhibition, Disasterville demonstrates the science behind natural disasters throughout the world, using immersion theatres with exciting walk-through scenes of four natural disasters: hurricane, tornado, wildfire, and earthquakes. The 10,000 square foot exhibition also includes exhibits on floods, hail, lightning, volcanoes, and tsunamis.

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National Building Museum Washington, District of Columbia

Type of Institution Created by an act of Congress in 1980, the National Building Museum is dedicated to exploring and celebrating architecture, design, engineering, construction, and urban planning. Exhibition subjects range from innovative and aesthetic uses of concrete to visions for affordable housing, exploring possibilities of rebuilding New Orleans, and contemporary ideas for building sustainable residences. Contact Information National Building Museum 401 F Street NW Washington, DC, 20001 Tel.: (202) 272-2448 Website(s) http://www.nbm.org Exhibit or Activity: Building Zone Description The Building Zone is a hands-on introduction to the building arts designed especially for the Museum’s youngest visitors, ages two to six. In this new exhibition, children can: • Build a tower or brick wall. • Curl up with an architecture picture book in the Book Nook. • Drive bulldozers and other construction play trucks in the Construction Zone. • Imagine being a craftsperson complete with a hard hat, tool belt, and goggles. • Explore the National Building Museum's Project Playhouse.

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National Engineers Week (nationwide)

Type of Institution The National Engineers Week Foundation, a formal coalition of more than 75 professional societies, major corporations and government agencies, is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers among young students and by promoting pre-college literacy in math and science. Engineers Week is designed to raise public understanding and appreciation of engineers' contributions to society. Founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, it is among the oldest of America's professional outreach efforts. Contact information National Engineers Week Foundation 1420 King Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Tel.: (703) 684-2852 Email: eweek@nspe.org Website(s) http://www.eweek.org Exhibit or Activity: Engineering Woman Description: Special activities and opportunities to acquaint girls and young women with engineering as an educational pursuit and profession are provided as part of National Engineers Week activities.

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National Museum of American History Washington, District of Columbia

Type of Institution The National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, collects and preserves more than 3 million artifacts. In dealing with that history topic, some aspects of civil engineering have been presented. Contact Information National Museum of American History 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20439 Tel.: (202) 633-1000 Email: info@si.edu Website(s) http://americanhistory.si.edu http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/subject_detail.cfm?key=32&colkey=15 Exhibit or Activity: “Engineering, Building, and Architecture” Description Not many museums collect houses. The National Museum of American History has four, as well as two outbuildings, 11 rooms, an elevator, many building components, and some architectural elements from the White House. Drafting manuals are supplemented by many prints of buildings and other architectural subjects. The engineering artifacts document the history of civil and mechanical engineering in the United States. The Museum preserves information on dams, skyscrapers, and bridges through blueprints, drawings, models, photographs, sketches, paintings, technical reports, and field notes.

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Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum Galveston, Texas

Type of Institution The Offshore Energy Center (OEC) uses an actual offshore platform, the Ocean Star, as its museum. Contact information Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig & Museum Pier 20 Galveston, TX 77550 Tel.: (409) 766- 7827 Website(s) http://www.oceanstaroec.com Exhibit or Activity: “Ocean Star” Description Visitors board the retired drilling rig and have access to three floors of models and interactive displays illustrating the story of offshore oil and gas, from seismic technology to exploration, and production. Scale models of production platforms, actual drill bits and remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), as well as videos and exhibits explain drilling, geology, seismic, well servicing and production. Visitors may also take the skywalk out onto the drill floor of the rig, or visit the exhibits on the pipe deck from the first floor of the museum

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Princeton University Art Museum Princeton, New Jersey

Type of Institution The Princeton University Art Museum, like most university art museums, has an educational and research mission related to the university’s art department, as well as being a popular art museum open to the public. Contact information Princeton University Art Museum Princeton, NJ 08544-1018 Tel.: (609) 258-3788 Website(s) http://www.princetonartmuseum.org http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/Bridges/ Exhibit or Activity: “The Art of Structural Design” Description “The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy” exhibit was produced through the collaboration of the Art Museum and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Princeton University. Through representations of original drawings as well as photographs, archival material, paintings, three-dimensional models, an interactive stereoscopic photography display, and CD-ROM presentation, Swiss Legacy explores the critical role aesthetics play in structural design. This includes some of these designers' most widely recognized and acclaimed projects:

• the George Washington, Bayonne, Bronx-Whitestone and Verrazano-Narrows bridges by Othmar Ammann, designer of many of America's greatest long-span steel bridges;

• the recently constructed Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston -- the widest cable-stayed bridge in the United States, as well as the Felsenau and Sunniberg bridges in Switzerland by Christian Menn, renowned for his exploration of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of prestressed concrete, among other materials;

• the Schwandbach, Salginatobel, and Vessy bridges in Switzerland by Robert Maillart -- recognized for his innovative use of reinforced concrete to create radical new forms in the first half of the twentieth century;

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• Heinz Isler's graceful concrete shells, more than 1,000 of which have been designed in the last 45 years, primarily in Switzerland, including the Heimberg Tennis Center and Grötzingen Open Air Theater.

Professor David Billington of the civil and environmental engineering department of Princeton produced the exhibit, with Susan Taylor, with members of the museum staff. Construction of the models was accomplished by undergraduate and graduate engineering students who traveled to Switzerland to photograph structures and conduct research, consulted archives, drafted drawings for use in the accompanying publication, applied AutoCAD and other software, and worked with fabrication technicians to construct detailed models.

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Reuben H. Fleet Science Center San Diego, California

Type of Institution The museum has a wide variety of exhibits, and includes an IMAX theater and planetarium. Contact information Reuben H. Fleet Science Center 1875 El Prado, Balboa Park San Diego, CA 92101 Website(s) http://www.rhfleet.org Exhibit or Activity: “San Diego’s Water: From Source to Tap”

Description Co-sponsored by the City of San Diego Water Department and the San Diego County Water Authority, the exhibit takes visitors on a virtual tour through the region’s water supply system, from distant sources to its local usage and conservation efforts.

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San Francisco Bay Model Sausalito, California

Type of Institution The San Francisco Bay Model Visitor Center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers until recently was a combination of a working hydraulic laboratory, simulating waterflow into and through San Francisco Bay, as well as a walk-through visitor experience. Currently it operates as only a visitor center, with the research functions previously performed by the model done via other means elsewhere. The Corps of Engineers has for many years been charged with studying the flow of rivers, floods and flood protection, and coastal engineering. In the San Francisco Bay Model, a very large physical model of the rivers leading into San Francisco Bay and out the Golden Gate to the Pacific was constructed. Studies could be made of dredging and other variables. In civil and environmental engineering, sometimes it is said that there is a “dry” side to the field (structural engineering, geotechnical engineering construction engineering) and a “wet” side (environmental engineering, water system design). The Bay Model is a clear example of how the “wet” side of civil and environmental engineering can be presented to the public. Contact Information San Francisco Bay Model Visitor Center 2100 Bridgeway Sausalito, CA 94965 Tel.: (415) 289-3009 Website(s) http://www.spn.usace.army.mil/bmvc/ Exhibit or Activity: The Bay Model Description Visitors enter a very large warehouse-type building and can walk around and over the hydraulic model. Displays explain how the model works, principles of hydraulic engineering, and related research such as studies of the Bay by ships. Numerous school field trips visit the center each year. Only a small part of the facility is pictured at right.

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Familiar landmarks, such as this scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge, are included in the model. (Only the base of the towers, the portion of the bridge that enters the water, are involved in the hydraulic modeling, but the inclusion of a model of the whole bridge helps orient the visitor.)

A technical hydraulic engineering subject such as Froude’s Law is explained for visitors who inquire further. (Younger visitors can proceed through the model without consulting the flip-up information charts.)

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Science Museum of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota

Type of Institution The Science Museum of Minnesota was founded in 1907, and in 1999 opened a 370,000-square-foot facility built into the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The building's 70,000 square feet of exhibit space includes a 10,000-square-foot temporary exhibit gallery, plus five permanent exhibit halls covering paleontology, physical sciences and technology, the human body, peoples and cultures, and the Mississippi River. Contact information Science Museum of Minnesota 120 W. Kellogg Blvd. St. Paul, MN 55102 Tel.: (800) 221-9444 Email: info@smm.org Website(s) http://www.smm.org/ http://www.smm.org/exhibitservices/history/water/ Exhibit or Activity: “Water: H2O = Life” Description This exhibit, developed with the American Museum of Natural History, follows the states of water as it cycles from the air to the land to the sea and back again. Presentation techniques include a 68-inch globe displaying composite satellite images of Earth, 3D video, live animals, walk-through dioramas, and more than 90 artifacts and models give visitors a firsthand experience of the power and importance of water. The exhibition also addresses the compelling issues facing societies and ecosystems around the globe related to water quality and availability. The exhibit features a fog screen, the workings of an artesian well, and a model of a river channel with a removable dam.

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Images of the word “water” in different languages projected on a dramatic fog screen greet visitors as they enter the exhibition Water: H2O = Life.

Photo: ©D. Finnin/AMNH

Water Planet, the Science on a Sphere—actual moving images of the Earth from space projected on a six-foot-diameter globe—is one of the highlights of the exhibition Water: H2O = Life at the American Museum of Natural History. As visitors observe the breathtaking views of our blue planet, they gain a deeper appreciation of water as a world-shaping force and our most precious resource.

Photo: ©D. Finnin/AMNH

Exhibit or Activity: EarthScapes Mini-Golf Description This exhibit is a novel way to combine entertainment and recreation in an outdoor area of the museum with learning about rivers, which fits the emphasis in other parts of the facility on the Mississippi River. As one progresses through the miniature golf course, the flowing adjacent watercourses illustrate sediment transport

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Sciencenter Ithaca, New York

Type of Institution The Sciencenter celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2008 as the leading science museum in northern New York. Contact Information Sciencenter 601 First Street Ithaca, NY 14850-3507 Website(s) http://www.techcityexhibition.org Exhibit or Activity: Tech City, A Traveling Museum Exhibition on Engineering Description: Tech City features 12 exhibits comprised of 20 activity stations for museum visitors of all ages with urban styling, including park benches and city-style banners. The diverse exhibits present real-world problems having goals and constraints that can be readily solved using an engineering approach that includes opportunities for designing, building, testing, and modifying. The exhibits, with hands-on activities, multi-media computers, and a video, appeal to a wide variety of learning styles.

Designed for: 8-13 year olds and their families Size: 3,000 sq.ft. Rental Fee: $24,000/3 months Partners: Cornell University; funded by NSF

Young children can do at least one thing at each station, while older visitors with more knowledge and experience can do more and learn more. Enclosed toddler spaces allow families to use the exhibits while toddlers are safely engaged in a nearby play area.

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The exhibits include these civil engineering topics: • Bridges • Hydraulic flow in pipes, separation of sediments • Dams • Airflow in a wind tunnel, hands-on ability to change the landscape to see different

wind patterns • Earthquake shake table • Design a plaza project, exploring costs and trade-offs • Ask An Engineer video, narrated by children

A description with photos is available, for more information on this exhibit: http://www.sciencenter.org/exhibits/exhibitionsforrent.asp

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Shizuoka Prefectural Earthquake Preparedness Education Center, Shizuoka, Japan

Type of Institution The Center has exhibits showing cutaway views of earthquake resistant house construction and other earthquake topics, as well as providing extensive information on earthquake hazard reduction and disaster response to the public. Website(s) http://www.e-quakes.pref.shizuoka.jp/english/index.htm Exhibit or Activity: Tsunami Wave Tank With Large Screen Movie Description At one end of a swimming-pool-sized wave tank, simulated tsunami waves are generated that roll up onto a scale model town at the other end of the pool. Meanwhile, visitors see movie images of tsunamis on a large screen.

Exhibit or Activity: Earthquake Shaking Room Description A shake table under this room-sized exhibit gives visitors a first-hand experience of how severely a building can shake in an earthquake.

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Skyscraper Museum New York, New York

Type of Institution Founded in 1996 by Carol Willis, an architectural history professor at Columbia University, the Skyscraper Museum is a private, not-for-profit, educational corporation devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. Located in New York City in lower Manhattan, the museum celebrates the city's architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programs and publications, the museum explores tall buildings around the world as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. Contact information The Skyscraper Museum 39 Battery Place New York, NY 10280 Tel.: (212) 945-6324 Email: education@skyscraper.org Email: info@skyscraper.org Website(s) Website: http://www.skyscraper.org Exhibit or Activity: “World’s Tallest Building” Description Focusing on the design and construction of the tower, the exhibition features architectural models, drawings and computer animations, wind-tunnel models, construction photographs and videos, animations of elevators and façade machinery, and a section of the curtain-wall, among many other items. The installation also discusses Burj Dubai in the historical context of the competition to erect the world’s tallest building, comparing it to a line-up of famous 20th-century towers, including New York’s Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings, as well as a special section on the Twin Towers and the rebuilding at Ground Zero.

Wind tunnel model used in the design of the World Trade Center

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Tech Museum of Innovation San Jose, California

Type of Institution The Tech's 132,000 square feet are currently divided among six themed galleries focused on Silicon Valley innovation, the Internet, the human body, exploration, the environment, and hands-on experimentation. Visitors from age 9 and up are the target audience. (The nearby Children’s Discovery Museum specifically serves children under age 9.) Contact Information The Tech Museum of Innovation 201 South Market Street San Jose, CA 95113 Tel.: (408) 294-TECH (8324) Email: info@thetech.org Website(s) http://www.thetech.org Description of Restless Planet exhibits: http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/permanent/index.php?sGalKey=lrp&galKey=ex Exhibit or Activity: “Living on a Restless Planet” Description This exhibit area focuses on the technologies used to study and monitor movement of the Earth's crust, with particular emphasis on Bay Area earthquakes. The earthquake motions are accurately reproduced using real data from the US Geological Survey and other sources. Visitors use real seismographic equipment such as creep meters and strain gauges in your own experiments. Earthquake Platform Visitors stand on an authentic research shake platform, hold onto the hand rail, and experience and compare different earthquakes. Make It, Shake It (Computer & Lab) At this computer station, visitors define parameters of a building such as height and materials, and then subject the building to different simulated earthquake motions. Adjusting the shaking intensity and frequency controls, a building may respond with some parts staying still while others move.

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Quake Watch Utilizes an on-line US Geological Survey program that is updated every few minutes to research recent earthquakes. Shown on a digital map, epicenters and magnitudes are listed. Other programs show how seismic waves move through and around the globe. Seismometers Allows visitors to try a real seismometer by pressing down on the handle to see how the magnet and coil move relative to each other and how this action generates an electric current. Sensing Earthquakes Taking continuous readings with a variety of instruments, geologists monitor compression and displacement of the Earth's crust along fault lines. Exhibits use both real and analog versions of the instruments, and demonstrate how each measures. By squeezing a granite block, a strainmeter shows how much shorter the block becomes. Pushing an adjacent granite block and a creepmeter measures the shift between the two blocks. Stand on another block and a tiltmeter senses the tilt as you lean side to side.

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Tongji University, State Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering

Shanghai, China Type of Institution Tongji University is one of China’s major universities and in particular a center for engineering education and research. The national government established a State Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering there that specializes in earthquake engineering. Contact Information State Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering Tongji University Shanghai 200092, China Website(s) http://www.tongji.edu.cn/english/Academics Exhibit or Activity: Shake Table Models of Tall Buildings Description On the campus of the university, detailed scale models of tall building designs that have been tested on the laboratory’s shake table (earthquake shaking simulator) are kept outside the lab, making a landscaped area take on the appearance of a scale-model city. The models, which can be over 30 feet (10 meters) in height, are made of special materials that reproduce some of the behavior of the actual full-scale structures, such as by using simulated concrete with tiny reinforcing bars in it. Although they were produced to have such interesting scaled-down detail for engineering research purposes, they make fascinating exhibits for the public.

A “miniature city” of high-rise buildings on the campus of Tongji University, outside the civil engineering department’s shake table laboratory.

photo: RR

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Top: the author standing in front of shake table models after they have been tested, including the model of the Shimao International Plaza directly behind him. Left: The completed Shimao International Plaza building, 333 meters (1100 feet) tall, in Shanghai.

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Chapter 7 The Designer’s Toolbox

Facility Requirements Chapter 3 discussed the need to consider requirements imposed on an exhibit by the physical characteristics of the overall exhibition facility. Before a design for an exhibit proceeds, its intended location must be defined. Will it be indoors, and can it be feasibly moved and mounted there? Will it be outside, with the attendant weather, vandalism, and theft considerations? This chapter, while not a comprehensive design guide, provides some helpful information at the scale of the individual exhibit.

Safety We live in a safety-conscious society with high standards intended to reduce dangers, and also to assign blame for anything that goes wrong. Safety concerns include the following. Sharp Corners Seemingly a simple concern, sharp corners are always on the list of safety concerns. It is surprising how many edges an exhibit can have, and how some of them would be relatively sharp if not specially designed otherwise. Corners and edges where a person can bump into the object should be blunt. A typical tabletop, for example, is usually about five centimeters (two inches) thick, which spreads out any impact force on a person’s body if they bump into it. A thin sheet of steel only a tenth of that thickness might be adequate to provide an exhibit tabletop, but that is a sharp enough edge to cause an injury if someone stumbles against it. Keep in mind that heads come in all various heights, from the less than one-meter height of the small child to the two meters of the tall person. Anything that could poke a person in the face or eyes is an especially important concern. Electricity Electricity for lights, a computer, or to power a motorized exhibit introduces the hazard of electrical shock. Grounded outlets and 3-prong cords of adequate gauge for the electrical load they carry, and installation of any special electrical components by a skilled technician or electrician, are required. Some electrical motors can draw a large load for a short time as they start up, which may not be obvious from simply looking at a label that lists its Wattage. Any junctions of wiring should be enclosed in electrical boxes within the exhibit. Motorized Components and Moving Parts If it is just barely possible for a small hand to reach some part of a moving exhibit and be harmed, or for the tie of a male visitor to catch on a moving part when he leans over the exhibit, then it might well happen. “Hands-on” has a positive connotation for engaging the visitor, but it can be a safety challenge for the exhibit designer. In an industrial setting, one can rely on danger signs that warn the employee not to touch something, but that doesn’t

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work in the museum. Moving parts that should be left visible to add to the effect of the exhibit can be enclosed behind clear plastic, using adequately thick sheets of acrylic (e.g., “Plexiglas,” a trademark for a product) or the stronger and more scratch-resistant (and more expensive) polycarbonate (e.g. “Lexan,” another trademarked product). (See Figure 7-1.) Glass should be safety glass (tempered, laminated, or wired).

Chemical Hazards Most exhibits do not contain any hazardous materials, but this safety consideration should be on the list of design factors. Stability An exhibit that is itself one sturdy object and that will be securely attached to the floor solves the stability problem of someone knocking it over accidentally or intentionally. Anchorage to the floor involves installing bolts through the flooring (the carpet, the resilient flooring, the wood floor surface) and thus is often avoided. In that case, the object should be adequately braced to a wall, or stocky enough (with a wide base on both the length and width axes). A low center of gravity is also needed. A tall exhibit on a base holding it up can have weights placed inside the base, resting on the bottom of that box, to lower the center of gravity. A significant amount of weight is also needed to keep the unsecured object from sliding if someone leans on it or pushes it, especially if there is little friction between its base and the flooring. An additional installation challenge arises in areas of significant seismicity. Most of the USA is mapped as having enough chance of earthquake shaking for building codes to require earthquake-resistant design of buildings. (FEMA 2003) Building codes typically apply to the building itself, not its contents, but it would be prudent for exhibit designers and a structural

Figure 7-1. Earthquake shake table exhibit. To protect visitors from moving parts, the two metal-clad replicas of buildings and the shake machine are enclosed in a plastic case. (Such a large and sturdy case can cost over $1,000). The visitor, however, can insert a hand through the cylindrical access provided to turn a knob to change the frequency of the shaking. When the frequency is slow, the taller building model responds more; when the frequency is faster, the taller one “calms down” and the short one “gets excited.” Simultaneously the visitor sees on the adjacent computer screen the graphing of the accelerations (shaking severity) at the roofs of the two buildings and at the “ground” (shake table platform). One large button turns the machine on, and a timer turns it off a short while later so it doesn’t wear itself out needlessly.

photo: exhibit by CUREE for RMS, Inc.

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engineering consultant if needed to apply the same criteria that are used for the anchorage and bracing of fixed equipment (e.g., air conditioning chillers, boilers, water heaters) in the installation of tall or heavy exhibits. Safe and Unsafe Failure Mechanisms It might seem that the overall safety goal is to design an exhibit that will never fail in any way. To be realistic, out of 100 exhibits that interact with visitors on the museum floor for a year, it is quite likely that there will be at least some failures. Light bulbs will burn out; a motor may fail; something may get broken; and so on. The design goal is to make sure all of the failure mechanisms lead to benign rather than dangerous situations. If the electrical/motorized component of an exhibit fails, the result should simply be that the exhibit doesn’t operate. If a piece gets broken, it would not fall on a visitor or produce a sharp edge.

Durability A piece of furniture in a living room may not be used many times in a week, while an exhibit is usually intended to be used by many people six or seven days per week. Wear and tear from usage by visitors is inevitable. Durability considerations include environmental effects, such as exposure to the weather for any outdoor exhibit. Selecting materials with inherently durable finishes is preferable to painting or re-finishing less durable surfaces later on. Small hand-held pieces of an exhibit – say building blocks or sticks in a structural exhibit – may get lost or stolen, or a child may absent-mindedly walk away with pieces. If the pieces can be inexpensively replaced, this deals with the problem not by preventing it but by working around it. Motorized exhibits can have timers built in so that when the visitor pushes a button, the machine will activate for some set period of time, such as a minute. The visitor need not push an off button or off switch to keep the machine from wearing itself out unnecessarily. Easy staff access to inner portions of an exhibit for maintenance or repair is desirable. Fatigue, which can cause metal and other materials to fracture after many repeated cycles of loading, even if the forces are quite low, is a concern where exhibits move back and forth or rotate many times a day.

Accessibility There are high standards today for accessibility for the disabled, as discussed earlier. At the level of the design of an individual exhibit, accessibility for the disabled includes such things as providing a safe and easy path for a wheelchair to and from the exhibit; a base curb of vertical cabinet face from the floor up so a blind person can sense that they are approaching the object by means of a cane; larger type to make it easier to read and multiple languages as needed, and braille or audio counterparts of display information. (See Figure 7-2.)

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Security The most common security concern is theft. Computers are a high-value attraction to thieves and must be built into the exhibit housing or provided with security cable and lock. Even other items that don’t seem to be of significant value may still “find legs” and walk out of the facility if not attached. When putting the item in a protective case is not desirable, as in the case where the intent is to have the visitor touch the item, the designer should consider whether any pieces can be disassembled by hand or with a small screwdriver one might have on a keychain. Security fasteners are available that help prevent amateur thieves and vandalism.

Aesthetics Imagine an exhibition that consists of ten separate items, with some of the items having multiple pieces. Along with graphic design on the website and signage and display boards in the museum, these various physical pieces of the exhibit should have an integrated aesthetic design, just as the ten rooms of a house should have an integrated architectural design. When different colors are used, the differences should have a purpose. When text is changed, it should not be done randomly. If the “look” or design aesthetic is sleek, then exposing inner workings of an exhibit may be at cross-purposes with the overall design aesthetic. If the intended appearance is like an inventor’s workshop, then exposing as much as possible is desirable. Making an exhibit look like an oversized brightly colored toy may be an appropriate design motif for a children’s museum, while a dignified presentation may be appropriate for a presentation of valuable engineering artifacts. Models that are finely crafted and realistic have an intrinsic attraction and may be worth the extra cost as compared to cruder models. The reader has probably noticed how visitors standing in front of an exhibit may step closer and pay more attention as they notice there is more detail than they

Figure 7-2. Model of St. Stephen’s Basilica, Budapest, Hungary, which a blind person can feel and understand. The accompanying text on the exhibit is in braille. The materials are all non-rusting metal for durability and with rounded edges. The exhibit is located outdoors next to the church.

photo: RR

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first saw. “Oh look at this!” they may say to a companion – a reaction that is very rewarding to the exhibit designer. Science, engineering, and art all have beauty as one of their motivating forces, and simply because the exhibit is an engineering or science exhibit rather than an art exhibit does not mean that attention and talent should not be applied to its aesthetic design.

Traveling Exhibits It might seem that most science museum exhibits would be designed as traveling exhibits, since most exhibits turn over every few years. It would seem to be an excellent way to get more value for the original investment. Costs of traveling exhibits can be surprisingly high, however, and what may have fit in well as a successful exhibit in one museum may not be successful elsewhere. In addition to shipping and insurance, the administrative process of booking the tour of the exhibit can be complex. It may not be possible for the exhibit to be packed up and sent from one museum on Monday and arrive and be installed at another on Tuesday, making interim storage a requirement. Designing exhibits so they can be taken apart and shipped, and so that they are sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of travel, are other challenges. Custom-made crates with packing to fit the contents are usually required. An alternative to the field trip that brings the students to the science museum is for the science museum to visit the school, for example providing science demonstrations and presentations for an assembly or program in the school auditorium. This is not termed a “traveling exhibit, but this activity is similar in that it involves even more stringent requirements for the exhibit or resources to be able to be packed up, transported, set up, and taken back to the museum. While the typical traveling exhibit is shipped via a trucking company from one locale to another, the museum’s exhibits or resources for a school assembly would more typically be brought by the museum staff themselves in an ordinary car or van and carried or rolled on carts by themselves into the school. A self-contained cart that can easily be loaded off the vehicle and wheeled into the classroom or auditorium may make a simple but effective kit for transportation to classrooms or other temporary venues.

Scale Models and Similitude Working models of civil engineering construction can be categorized as static, those that do not move, and dynamic, those that do move. Scale effects are important considerations in both cases. As the absolute size of an object changes, the relationship of one of its characteristics to another changes, even if a model is a precisely scaled-down version of the actual, larger object or structure. One may be a geometric identical twin of the other, except for overall size, but may have different ratios of size to weight, or strength to load. In the civil engineering laboratory, researchers employ correction factors to make their scale model versions behave realistically. In the science museum, the exhibit designer must consider scale effects and choose to make one or more aspects of the working scale model behave realistically while allowing other characteristics to be out-of-scale.

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Galileo (Crew and Salvio, translators, 1914) pointed out in 1637 that one cannot merely scale up the geometry of the structure of an animal while keeping constant the proportion of the size of a bone to the rest of the body. (Think of a column holding up a building in visualizing the role of a bone such as a leg bone). By and large, the volume and thus weight of a object goes up as the cube of its overall dimension, while the cross-sectional area of a support such as a leg bone goes up only as the square. “…it would be impossible to build up the bony structures of men, horses, or other animals so as to hold together and perform their normal functions if these animals were to be increased enormously in height; for this increase in height can be accomplished only by employing a material which is harder and stronger than usual, or by enlarging the size of the bones, thus changing their shape.” This can be clearly seen in the actual case of a comparison of the lower leg bones of a dinosaur and a human (Figure 7-4).

An ant can carry a twig that is longer and heavier than its own body, but a horse cannot carry a tree trunk that is longer and heavier than itself. A person can sit on a dollhouse and not collapse it, but picture your house if King Kong sat on it. These dimensional or scale effects are interesting in and of themselves and could be communicated via an exhibit. In any event, scale must be considered if the exhibit designer is to achieve a realistic result in a working model that behaves in a way similar to the real object, Consider this example, derived from D’Arcy Thompson (Thompson 1917, 1961), in which only simple math is involved. Two weights of cube shape each hang by a wire. Each geometric feature of the larger is reduced in half to produce the smaller, half-scale model.

Figure 7-3. Galileo’s sketch of the scale effect

Figure 7-4. (Left) Fossil of dinosaur, Tokyo National Science Museum

photo RR (Right) skeleton of human being, photo Martyn Page, Human Biology, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2001. While the overall length of the dinosaur is only about twice that of the human, its volume (and weight) is much more than twice as much. Note the difference in proportions of the leg bones necessary to hold up their respective weights.

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The weight of the larger is proportional to the volume of the weight (neglecting the slight weight of the wire). Assume it is 20 units by 20 units by 20 units, or a volume and associated weight of 203 = 8,000 units. The smaller model’s weight is 10 x 10 x 10, or 1000 units—only one-eighth the weight of the larger, not one-half. The loads on the wires are in the proportion 1:8, the smaller to the larger, while the geometric scale is in the ratio 1:2. Now consider the wires. Their strength is proportional not to their volume but only to their cross-sectional area, which is a circular shape. The larger has a diameter we will assume to be 2 units, and its radius is half the diameter of 2 or 1 unit. So, its area is π (r2,), or π (12,), or π. The smaller model’s wire has a diameter half that of the larger one, or 1 unit, and a radius of 0.5 units. Its cross-sectional area is thus π (0.52), or 0.25 π. The ratio of area, and thus tensile strength, of the two wires is 1:4, smaller to larger. We found that the ratio of load is 1:8. The load of the larger is 8 times greater than the smaller, but its strength is only 4 times greater. The more we shrink the small-scale model, the more the disparity: The small model gets excessively strong, compared to the larger one it is supposed to model. Scale effects also apply to dynamics, i.e., when the forces on an object do not balance and the resulting “average” of the forces (resultant) causes it to move. Consider the three cases in Figure 7-5. It might seem like the actual dimensions of a pendulum would not make a difference in how it swings, but one cannot calculate its period of vibration – the period of time it takes for it to complete one to-and-fro cycle – without knowing it’s actual length.

Or if one were to invert the situation to have two flagpoles with heavy decorative spheres at their tops, one tiny flagpole model and one full-size one, and if you gave a jolt to their bases, we would also have to know their actual characteristics to predict how fast or slow they would vibrate back and forth. In this case, the key information is the ratio of the mass and the stiffness of the flagpoles. The little model would tend to vibrate at a high frequency (rapid rate), while the tall, full-size one would tend to sway back and forth at a much lower frequency. In the earthquake shake table engineering lab, when small-scale structural models are used for convenience because the full-scale building or bridge is unmanageably large to make into a full-scale model, the model tends to be too stiff compared to its mass, and additional mass (concrete or metal weights) are added to preserve dynamic similitude. The

Figure 7-5. The dynamics of a simple system such as a pendulum cannot be understood without knowing its actual dimensions. If the pendulum is of tiny size (B), it will swing back and forth very quickly. If it is of large size (C), the arc-shaped path the pendulum follows is much longer and it will take a longer time to swing back and forth.

illustration: Christopher Arnold and RobertReitherman, Building Configuration andSeismic Design, John Wiley and sons,

New York, 1982.(A) (B) (C)

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frequency of the motion of the shake table can also be adjusted to achieve what is called dynamic similitude. The exhibit designer who is producing a small-size working model representing a large civil engineering structure must consider what aspects of its behavior are to be represented realistically, and which are unimportant. If the model is not a working model, then simply geometrically scaling all the parts of the model produces a realistic effect. If principles of strength or stiffness are to be investigated by the visitor, they must be adjusted (reduced) in the small model, or the load on it increased. If the amount of movement in a real structure when it vibrates due to earthquakes, wind, wave impact, etc., is a key aspect of the model, it will probably be necessary to make the model deflect or bend in an accentuated manner to be noticeable. If the frequency of the shaking is an important point about dynamics to be explored, then the mass/stiffness ratio (period of vibration) must be tinkered with to get the structure to have an inherent tendency to vibrate back and forth at a given target rate. (Adjusting mass in the model may be easier than adjusting the stiffness of its structure, so the fine-tuning might be accomplished by adding or subtracting little weights inside the model. It is easy to change the mass in small, definite steps, but difficult to do so with the stiffness.) There are many aspects of dynamics where simple geometric scaling from the large, actual case down to a small model results in lack of similitude of some important characteristics. Where hydraulics are concerned, Froude’s Law comes into play. William Froude (1810-1879), a British engineer, conducted naval architecture tests in large tanks by pulling models of ships. He compared the waves they created, which work against the propulsion energy of the ship by causing resistance; there is also frictional resistance along the surface of the hull. He towed identically shaped hull models of different sizes. He found that as one tests models of identical shape of larger and larger size, there is not a constant relationship between speed and resistance. In aerodynamics, similar principles are at work. In wind-resistant design, doubling of wind speed results not in an increase in pressure by a factor of 2 but rather by a factor of 22, or four times. In general, for a bridge or roof structure that rests on supports at either end, the formula wl2/8 defines the amount of bending it must resist, where w is the weight per unit length (e.g., kilograms per meter or pounds per foot), and l (for length) is the span, in the same units of meters or feet. Because l (length), the span, is squared, if you triple the span you increase the maximum bending the structure must resist not by 3 times but by 3 times 3 or 9 times. For the visitor to obtain a valid understand of the civil engineering principle they see in operation in an exhibit, scale effects must be considered in the initial design stage. This is not to say that a static model of a large civil engineering work cannot be interesting in and of itself, since many museum visitors over the years have stood in front of exhibits showing scale models of buildings, bridges, mine shafts or other civil engineering items and found them interesting. It is also possible to combine a static part of an exhibit that does not have to preserve similitude with one that does. In Figure 7-6, the strength, stiffness, weight, or vibration characteristics of the bridge need not be scaled to those quantities in the actual full-size bridge, but it is necessary to scale the speed of the locomotive that passes over the

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bridge. Imagine the toy train actually going over the model bridge at 100 km/hr (60 mph): It would be a fleeting blur, and it would seem to be traveling as fast as an airplane.

The Exhibit the Museum Already Has: Itself As discussed earlier, an actual civil engineering work can be the centerpiece of an exhibit. A science museum can treat its own building as the raw material for an exhibit, and provide interpretation and instrumentation throughout the building to make engineering phenomena visible. For example, an “aquarium” wall in a subgrade level could expose the visitor to a section of the outside earth, with an explanation of how geotechnical engineering analyzed that soil for purposes of designing the foundation. A section of underground pipe might be exposed to view in that “aquarium” space. Instruments can be installed in a building that instantly read out the force going through a column or the slight motion of the building as people walk about or the breeze blows, even if these motions are too slight for a person to perceive. Temperature effects on construction materials must be considered in its design and can be measured. A steel column in the sunlight may “grow” a fraction of an inch while one in the shade may “shrink.” If a person for a moment hangs from a beam of the building roof overhead by sitting in a seat suspended from it, this adds a very tiny load compared to the weight of the roof above. Nevertheless, the beam deflects or sags measurably because of that one person’s added weight, and an instrument’s measurement of that bending can be instantaneously displayed, with accompanying information explaining stress and strain or other principles. Every building housing a science museum offers many such possibilities for exhibits, and a new building that is being designed can cleverly incorporate such features to a greater extent.

Figure 7-6. Tokyo Transportation Museum exhibit of a locomotive crossing a bridge. The key similitude consideration is that the speed of the toy-size train be in scale to the length of the model bridge. If it would take theactual train several seconds to cross the actual bridge traveling at 100 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour), then the exhibit’s train must take this long to go that scaled-down distance on the model bridge.

photo: RR

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Appendix A Civil Engineering Terminology Every field has its specialized terminology, which can seem to be mere jargon to the outsider. A few of the terms civil engineers use, and their simplified definitions, are provided below. This may help the science museum professional communicate with the engineer. analysis: testing a design by engineering analysis, which consists of mathematical techniques based on principles of applied physics capacity: ability of a structure to resist some load or force, analogous to the asset side of a financial balance sheet in an engineer’s calculations code: sometimes engineers refer to a building code, the legal regulations governing building design and construction as “the code;” “the code” could also refer to a computer code (software) depending on the context compression: pushing forces, such as when push down on a sponge you compress it demand: the load or force exerted on a structure, analogous to the liability side of a balance sheet in an engineer’s calculations deflection: bending or other change in shape of a structural member; when you stand on a flexible plank of wood, its deflection is easy to see, while categorically similar deflections in buildings are designed to be very small but still occur design: proposing the configuration, materials, and details (e.g., how one structural member is connected to another) for a civil engineering project; a preliminary design may consist of hand-drawn or computer-generated sketches with assumptions and estimates displacement: movement of an object to a different position dynamics: the branch of physics and engineering that deals with moving objects elastically: a material behaves elastic if it returns to its original shape after a force acts on it, as when a steel bar flexes but returns to its straight position when the force is removed. A basic principle of engineering is that stress is proportional to strain, up to a material’s elastic limit. If the material is permanently bent, or is cracked or otherwise deformed, then it has behaved inelastically (and there is some damage to the material).

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load: forces applied to the structure that it must resist, such as the gravity load of its own weight, the snow load on the roof, or the wind load model: an engineering model may be a physical one, such as model of a bridge on display in a case or a model one can test by placing weights on it; a model can also refer to a mathematical representation of a structure pressure: a force distributed over an area probability: chance that an event will occur; engineers use probabilistic design to consider a variety of hazards to their structures, such as windstorms or earthquakes, and also to take into account that there is some amount of variation in strength or stiffness of structural materials from the nominal or listed values shear: tendency to slide one part of a structure vis-à-vis another; for example, the horizontal force in a house in an earthquake causes shear between its base and the foundation in the ground, a shear force that is resisted by anchor bolts statics: the branch of physics and engineering that analyzes objects that remain in equilibrium, with the forces balancing each other. In the design of a bridge, the goal is obviously to have the vertical downward forces of gravity be counteracted by equal upward forces mobilized by the strength of the bridge, and statics makes that analysis possible. strain: the change in shape or length of a material when acted upon by a force. The strain of an ordinary kitchen sponge that your hand squishes down on is obvious to see: Compressive force causes compressive strain, or compaction. Pull on a rubber band, and the tensile (pulling) strain is also visible. Strain gauges are instruments that can precisely measure similar effects on materials that are too subtle to see. stress: a force acting over an area. A weight placed on a small-diameter column (picture a broomstick handle) will cause a higher stress in the material of that stick or post than the same weight placed on a large-diameter post (picture a telephone pole.) tension: a pulling force

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Appendix B Science Museum Terminology Every field has its specialized terminology, which can seem to be mere jargon to the outsider. A few of the terms the staff members of museums use, and their simplified definitions, are provided below. This may help the civil engineer communicate with the science museum professional. center, see science center citizen science: involvement of non-scientists in data collection or other aspects of scientific research curator: (from the Latin curare, to take care of); the administrator responsible for a portion or all of a museum; “director” is currently the more common term director: the chief executive of a museum; the former common term was curator docent: a guide who interacts with the public in the museum and is usually a volunteer evaluation: the process of analyzing an exhibit or other offering to improve its design (front-end and formative evaluations) and to document successes and failures and provide insights for future work (summative evaluations). See also visitor studies. formative evaluation: evaluation of an exhibit or other educational activity in its design stage; criteria for success are developed that can be observed or measured later on front-end evaluation: pre-design consideration of visitor characteristics to set exhibit objectives informal science education: education that takes place outside the classroom in settings such as science museums and visitor centers museum, see science museum public understanding of research: communicating and sometimes engaging the public in current research science center: same as science-technology center; a term that indicates the hands-on and interactive nature of exhibits in what is more generically called a science museum; a science center may also take forms other than a museum, such as a visitor center or aquarium.

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science museum: the generic term used in this document to include science centers; “museum” has the connotation of a facility housing exhibits that may not be interactive (e.g., objects on display in cases) and which often has a research role in collecting and preserving information and items. science standards: educational standards issued by state or federal agencies or academic organizations summative evaluation: summary evaluation, conducted after information has been collected on the operation of the exhibit and how visitors have used it public understanding of research: the goal of providing current information and activities to the public, so that the citizenry is better informed on the process of science and scientific findings on current issues. Dealing with controversial topics is one of the common aspects of public understanding of research, with the role of the science museum being to provide a neutral rather than advocacy-based source of information. traveling exhibit: an exhibit designed to travel from one science museum to another, or (less commonly) one designed to be mobile and housed in a vehicle. visitor studies: Evaluation can be considered an aspect of visitor studies, but evaluation is usually spoken of in the context of evaluating a specific exhibit or program. Visitor studies include surveys via questionnaires or interviews to more broadly learn about the current or potential visitors of a museum

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Appendix C Directory of Information on Civil Engineering

American Academy of Environmental Engineers The American Academy of Environmental Engineers was founded in 1952. Aside from services to its professional members, it provides career information to the public. It publishes a magazine, Environmental Engineer.

American Academy of Environmental Engineers 130 Holiday Court, Suite 100 Annapolis, MD 21401 Tel.: (410) 266-3311 Email: info@aaee.net Website: http://www.aaee.net

American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE is the largest civil engineering society in the world and has local chapters throughout the United States. A science museum seeking either nation-wide information on civil engineering or contacts with a local ASCE chapter may find this a useful resource. Career information on civil engineering for young people is provided via publications and the ASCE website.

American Society of Civil Engineers 1801 Alexander Bell Drive Reston, VA 20191-4400 Tel.: (202) 789-2200; (800) 548-2723 Website: http://www.asce.org

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American Society for Engineering Education ASEE has as its primary membership college faculty in engineering departments, including civil and environmental engineering. It provides an avenue for communicating with these educators and learning how they educate students at the higher education level. On its website (K-12 tab) it offers information specific to education at pre-college grades, including “Engineering: Go for It!” a career guidance booklet for high school educators and students; “Why K-12 Engineering?” a curricular guide for teachers; national conferences on K-12 engineering education; and an on-line directory of engineering educator outreach institutions and individuals who might be drawn upon by a school or science museum in their particular locale.

American Society for Engineering Education 1818 N Street, NW Suite 600 Washington, DC 20036-2479 Tel.: (202) 331-3500 Website: http://www.asee.org

Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors AEESP has 700 professor members from universities around the world. Its educational focus is currently on higher education rather than lower grade levels or informal science education.

Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors 2903 Naples Court Champaign, IL 61822 Tel.: (217) 398-6969 Website: http://www.aeesp.org

Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering CUREE, an association of civil engineering-related earthquake researchers and educators at two dozen Member Universities, has produced the document you are reading and is pleased to provide further information on request. The organization has mounted several exhibits for the public on earthquake engineering and more broadly civil engineering.

CUREE 1301 S. 46th Street – Building 420 Richmond, CA 94804 Tel: (510) 665-3529 Email: curee@curee.org Website: http://www.curee.org

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National Academy of Engineering The NAE offers several relevant kinds of information on its website. As of 2008, a report was in progress on the Public Understanding of Engineering. A subsidiary website, EngineerGirl is aimed at middle-school female students. Another website is devoted to Celebration of Women in Engineering.

National Academy of Engineering 500 Fifth Street, NW Washington, DC 20001 Tel.: (202) 334-3200 NAE website: http://www.nae.edu Engineer Girl website: http://www.engineergirl.org

National Council of Structural Engineering Associations NCSEA publishes a magazine, STRUCTURE, which provides an outlet for informing structural engineers around the USA of opportunities or methods for collaborating with science museums. Its primary educational focus is on the undergraduate and graduate education of engineering students, but it has in interest in pre-college familiarizing of students with the career option of structural engineering as well.

National Council of Structural Engineers Associations 645 N. Michigan Avenue, #540 Chicago, IL 60611 Tel.: (312) 649-4600 Website: http://www.ncsea.com

National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering NACME was established in 1974, NACME. The organization supports efforts to increase the African American, American Indian and Latino participation in engineering and math and science careers.

NACME 440 Hamilton Ave, Suite 302 White Plains NY 10601-1813 Tel.: (914) 539-4010 Website: http://www.nacme.org Email: webmaster@nacme.org

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Structural Engineers Associations Professional associations of structural engineers may be found in many states, and most have an outreach or public information committee that stands ready to offer speakers, information about structural engineering as a career, and other services to the public. The easiest way to find out about these associations is to consult the website of the Structural Engineers Association International, which has links to associations in various states or portions of states as well as in other countries. Structural Engineers Association International Website: http://www.seaint.org

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Appendix D Directory of Information on Science Centers and Science Museums

Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) The Association of Children’s Museums has over 340 member museums in 23 countries. A data point indicating the relatively young age of many of these museums is that almost a quarter of its membership are in their start-up phase. The oldest in the USA, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, was started in 1899, while ACM was founded in 1962 and only began a more active phase in 1986. Website: http://www.childrensmuseums.org

American Association of Museums The AAM, over a hundred years old, has 15,000 museum professionals as individual members, as well as 3,000 institutional members, which span a great range of different types of museums. It provides conference and professional development services, a “Museum Marketplace” listing consultants and vendors providing a variety of services and products for museums, an assessment service, and other activities. The Committee on Audience Research and Evaluation provides information on that topic, including introductory material, references, and a list of evaluation consultants.

American Association of Museums 1575 Eye (I) Street NW, Suite 400 Washington, DC 20005 Tel: (202) 289-1818 Email: servicecentral@aam-us.org Website: http://www.aam-us.org

Association of Zoos and Aquariums The AZA was founded in 1924 and is the leading organization of its type in the USA. One of its primary functions is accreditation.

Association of Zoos and Aquariums 8403 Colesville Road - Suite 710 Silver Spring, MD 20910 Tel.: (301) 562-0777

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Association of Science-Technology Centers “Science-technology centers” refers to museums that feature hands-on interactive science and technology exhibits. ASTC has 540 institutional members in 40 countries, including not only the science museum but zoos, aquariums, planetariums, and visitor centers. An annual conference brings together members as well as vendors and consultants exhibiting products and services. ASTC provides management services for traveling exhibits and web-provided resources. ASTC received funding from NSF in 2007 to operate the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (separately listed below).

Association of Science-Technology Centers 1025 Vermont Avenue NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20005-6310 Tel: (202) 783-7200 Email: info@astc.org Website: http://www.astc.org

Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education Established with NSF funding in 2007, CAISE operates within the organizational home of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (see above). An on-line newsletter (briefCAISE) is available. As of this writing, CAISE is in its formative stage, but it is expected to be a highly visible and useful resource in the field as an umbrella organization bringing together people and organizations in the field.

CAISE 1025 Vermont Avenue NW - Suite 500 Washington, CD 20005-6310 Email: info@caise.insci.org Website: http://insci.org

Ecsite Ecsite is the European Network of Science Centres and Museums. To keep a manageable scope to the document here, we have featured American examples and list resources primarily in the USA. The Ecsite website has an online directory of museums in Europe.

Email: info@ecsite.net Website: http://www.ecsite.net

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Informalscience Informalscience, operated by the University of Pittsburgh (see separate UPCLOSE listing), provides a variety of web-provided resources on informal science learning. It includes an archive of evaluation reports, a searchable resource list of research reports on informal science learning, education opportunities for people in the field, and a list of upcoming events in the field.

Email: jtm40@pitt.edu Website: http://www.informalscience.org

Institute for Learning Innovation ILI was founded in 1986 to increase the effectiveness of services to visitors in settings such as museums, libraries, and parks. In addition to providing consulting services, such as for evaluation, it offers lists of resources in the field, including a reference list.

Institute for Learning Innovation 3168 Braverton Street - Suite 280 Edgewater, MD 21037 Tel.: (410) 956-5144 Email: info@ilinet.org Website: http://www.ilinet.org

Museum Education Roundtable Formed in 1969, MER publishes the Journal of Museum Education, aimed at museum practitioners and educators. It provides a virtual roundtable for connecting members of these two audiences and providing professional development resources.

Museum Education Roundtable P.O. Box 15727 Washington, DC 20003 Tel.: (202)-547-8378 Email: info@mer-online.org Website: http://www.mer-online.org

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National Center for Technological Literacy The Museum of Science in Boston is the home of the National Center for Technological Literacy, which provides on-line resources for teachers and museums. Several subject areas in the discipline of civil engineering are included in its span of technologies. Its focus in terms of grade levels for connections with schools is pre-K through 12. Its Engineering is Elementary is aimed at the elementary school grades. Engineering the Future is a year-long curricular plan for high school students.

National Center for Technological Literacy Museum of Science Science Park Boston, MA 02114 Tel.: (617) 723-2500 Email: info@nctl.org Website: http://www.mos.org/nctl

National Science Teachers Association NSTA has 55,000 members, mostly teachers but also scientists, educational agency staff members, and others interested in science education. Professional development for teachers, a magazine and newsletter, and conferences are offered. It emphasized kindergarten through 16 (college) grades. Focused mailing lists of members by geographic region, grade level, and discipline are available for a cost.

National Science Teachers Association 1840 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA 22201 Tel: (703) 243-7100 Email: registry@nsta.org Website: http://www.nsta.org

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National Science Foundation NSF has a dozen divisions or Directorates, some of which are defined by scientific or engineering discipline e.g. Biology, Engineering, Geosciences). In the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, there is an Informal Science Education (ISE) program that is very relevant to the subject of science museums. NSF has been releasing an annual solicitation (request for proposals) that provides funding opportunities for a wide range of activities relating to the broadly defined field of science museums.

National Science Foundation Informal Science Education Directorate for Education and Human Resources 4201 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA 22230 Tel: (703) 292-8616 Email: ERLISE@nsf.gov Website: http://www.nsf.gov

University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments UPCLOSE “research focuses on relationships between learners, mediators, environments, and experiences.” Its projects are grouped in seven categories: art, digital, family, museum, science, tech, and islands. (“Island” is used metaphorically; an “island of expertise” is “a collection of knowledge, interest, and activity around a specific topic.”) Informalscience (see separate listing above) is a project of UPCLOSE.

UPCLOSE 3939 O’Hara Street Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Website: http://upclose.lrdc.pitt.edu Email: upclose@pitt.edu

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Visitor Studies Association The Visitors Studies Association is a professional association of specialists who study “visitor experiences in informal learning settings.” It was founded in 1988, when the practice of studying the experiences of visitors to museums was a young specialization. Through an annual conference, publications, and website it provides the professional in this field with relevant resources.

Visitor Studies Association PO Box 4375 Columbus, OH 43214 Tel: (614) 670-7379 Email: info@visitorstudies.org Website: http://www.vistorstudies.org

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