The Leo on Wheels: Creativity Month

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Blog entry by Kimberly Ralphs, The Leo on Wheels program manager, and Danielle Follett Chard, The Leonardo's intern.

We've spent the past month making the most of International Creativity Month, and no part of The Leo team celebrates creativity more than The Leo on Wheels. The team has stayed busy this school year visiting more than 4,500 students at 15 schools, and that's still with several months left to go in the school year. Our team has worked hard to create opportunities for kids to break our their thinking caps.

After learning about forces and motion by exploring our exhibits and completing an experiment, students work in groups to design and build marble runs using a variety of materials.

The Leo on Wheels is a science education program, but we also help students tap into the creativity they already have. In addition to getting students excited about science, we teach them about the importance of asking questions, making connections between different concepts, and using creativity to find solutions to problems.


Students work in groups to create a Rube Goldberg-type machine to transfer energy and movement. Students have to figure out creative ways to set things up to be able to move without human intervention.

Students work in groups and overcome problems together by utilizing every member's creative potential to build chain reactions and marble runs. We're always surprised by how creative the students get -- just when we think we've seen all the possible solutions to a common problem, a student will find a new way to solve it.

Each group is responsible for approximately three feet of the long chain. At the end of class we hook it all together and run it to see if it works.

Our team also helps schools enhance their science programs in a variety of ways. While the students are exploring the exhibits our staff members give the teachers suggestions for implementing inquiry-based activities in their classrooms. One teacher wrote us after a visit and said, "It was great to see the kids look at things and become inquisitive. I know they will remember some of those exhibits the rest of their lives." And few months ago when a teacher saw that one of our exhibits uses a Van de Graaff generator she told us that the school had the generator but it hadn't worked for more than five years. Our team took a look and were able to identify that it only needed a new part. We gave the teacher one of our spare parts and the generator was up and working again so the students could continue to have fun with science long after we left.

The team is staying busy visiting schools every week and offering free Community Nights where anyone can come see, learn, and experience everything we offer the students on our visits. We'd love to have you come by when we're in your area, so check the schedule and come explore your creative potential with The Leo on Wheels team!

Become a fan of The Leonardo on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Labels: creativity, education, outreach, science, The Leo on Wheels

Sundance: New Frontier

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Blog entry by Danielle Follett Chard, The Leonardo's intern.

The Sundance Film Festival begins in a few days and everyone is gearing up for 10 days of art, film, and celebrity sighting. The festival is bringing back New Frontier with a change of venue but the same high-quality art as usual.

New Frontier highlights new media art, which is anything from unusual film to interactive computer programming projects, all with a heavy emphasis on storytelling and the audience's perspective. Their old Main Street location is history, as the installations are now in the historic Miners Hospital, and a collaboration with the Salt Lake Art Center means that there is now also a downtown Salt Lake City location. The spaces will showcase media installations, multimedia performances, and transmedia performances by artists from around the world.

Visitors in All That is Solid Melts Into Air. Image via Self Selector.

All That is Solid Melts Into Air by Mark Bolous book ends visitors with contrasting documentaries about energy and oil. Two films, one about a Nigerian guerrilla group fighting against the colonization of petroleum resources on their land and the other showing stock traders in Chicago discussing energy futures, will be projected on opposite sides of the room. Viewers stand in the middle and try to negotiate the differences.

Image of Moony via Ars Electronica's Flickr page.

Other works are more interactive; guests will be able to touch and experience the art. One such presentation is Moony, by Japanese artists Akio Kamisato, Satoshi Shibata, and Takehisa Mashimo. Video of butterflies will be projected onto steam, so guests can interact with and affect the projection with their hands.

Images via Brain Pickings and Sleeping At Last.

Data-visualization artist Aaron Koblin and filmmaker Chris Milk have collaborated for two installations. The first is The Johnny Cash Project. Participants draw a picture of Johnny Cash which is then woven into an animated music video for his song "Ain't No Grave." Chris Milk's The Wilderness Downtown, an incredibly personalized video that uses HTML5 and Google Maps, was an internet music video for an Arcade Fire song of the same title (check out our thoughts about this project in an earlier blog entry).

New Frontier is one of the artistic highlights of the year for us. It's also totally free and open to the public, so make sure you catch the installations during the festival. Read more about all the pieces and check the schedule -- and don't forget to make time for this once-a-year event!

Become a fan of The Leonardo on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Labels: art, culture, events, locals, performance, video

A helpful hi-tech helmet

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Blog entry by Carmin Smoot and Danielle Follett Chard, The Leonardo's interns.

The use of the helmet only as buffer between head and serious head injury is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Head injuries could be detected more quickly and treated more successfully with a major development for those involved in dangerous sports like skiing and snowboarding. A helmet created by a Northeastern University research team can measure the severity of head injuries incurred during a powdery accident.

Professor Sinan Muftu (image via Physorg.com)

The helmet, called the "Head Impact Detection and Alert System," uses sensors that measure the downhill acceleration of a skier or snowboarder. At any impact, colors displayed on an LCD screen change in accordance with the severity of the accident -- displayed as green for low impact, and red for severe. The helmet hasn't yet been released to the public, but researchers foresee it being used in the future on the slopes.

PET brain scan (Flickr user Reigh LeBlanc, under Creative Commons License)

The helmet will undoubtedly prove useful in many fields of activity with frequent brain injury occurrences (for example, in other sports and for soldiers on the battlefield). However, despite many precautions ski accidents continue to make headlines. A head injury from a ski accident caused the death of actress Natasha Richardson in 2009, and gold-medalist skier Stein Eriksen, 80, broke his wrist, collar bone, and was left with a brain injury on a Deer Valley slope in 2007. He has recovered and continues to ski -- now reluctantly donning a helmet after more than 70 years of skiing without one.

Utah's possibly-official slogan of "The Greatest Snow on Earth" draws around four million skiers annually. Each year, Utah's slopes can expect to see about three fatalities and over 10,000 injuries. It's no wonder there are so many accidents when Utah skiers participate in crazy new stunts like in the video below.

Superior, Speed Fly from Marshall Miller on Vimeo.

Thankfully no one was hurt in this video, but chances are really good you'll fall at least once in your ski career. Though helmet is currently only in prototype versions, we can see it being used by everyone schussing down the slopes in future seasons.

Become a fan of The Leonardo on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Labels: locals, technology

Innovative iPads

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Blog entry by Danielle Follett Chard, The Leonardo's intern.

Technology is rapidly changing the way we communicate and interact with the people around us. The iPhone and iPad are at the forefront of many of these (sometimes strange) new ways computers are making their way into every corner of our lives. Here are some of my favorite innovative ways they are being used.

"Would you like fries with that?" -- Yep, there's an app for that. Image via News.com.AU.

A restaurant in Australia decided to drop boring paper menus and upgrade to a custom iPad menu app instead. The menu provides detailed pictures of the food, nutritional information, and can even suggest wines that pair best with each meal choice. The restaurant believes putting the customers in charge will eliminate wrong orders due to miscommunication and will give them a better experience because they can tailor the meal to fit their needs.

iPhones now help students study instead of distracting them. Image via Wired.

Abilene Christian University has utilized their students' cell phone addictions by using iPhones as a learning tool. The school provided students and instructors with phones that are linked to school maps, calendars of events, and lecture podcasts. Instructors use the search engines built into the phones instead of quickly outdated textbooks in class to teach students how to cut through the masses of information to find the best sources. And to accommodate introverted students, professors send anonymous polls directly to the phones.

I wonder if Ben Stiller is the voice of the tour guide? Images via NY Daily News and Mashable.

The American Museum of Natural History launched an app earlier this year that creates a more interactive experience for guests of the museum. The app gives visitors turn-by-turn directions, acts as a tour guide, or leads visitors on a fossil treasure hunt. Guests use the app to read more detailed information about each exhibit and can explore other exhibits ranked alphabetically, by popularity, or by location.

Image via LDS Church News.

On the local front, BYU opened "Carl Bloch: The Master's Hand," an exhibit featuring biblical scenes painted by the Danish artist, with iPad tour guides. Visitors can rent an iPad from the museum for $3 and a special app created specifically for the exhibit. The app gives information about each painting, like when it was created and its context in the Bible, and shows visitors panoramic pictures of where the art is normally displayed in Denmark. The app was created by BYU students and faculty and took more than a month (and a few trips to Denmark) to complete.

Wikipop in action. Image via Brooklyn Museum Blog.

The Brooklyn Museum opened an exhibit earlier this year on the women of pop art. To keep the simple pop art look of the gallery, information about each of the 25 artists was available on displayed iPads next to the art. This approach allowed the museum to provide oodles of information without cluttering the space with signage. A staff member at the museum spent the months leading up to the exhibit opening writing extensive Wikipedia articles on the artists, full of background information, links, images and more. The iPads were set with a "Wikipop" app that allowed visitors to browse the new articles and look up more information.

I love the ways museums are using technology in unexpected ways to help the visitors learn. Do you have any great ideas on how we can use iPads when we open?

Become a fan of The Leonardo on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Labels: creativity, culture, innovation, museum, technology

Labels

Archives

the leo newsletter

Featured programs 2009

Leonardo After Hours