Ever wanted to be inside a huge soap bubble?
It’s possible at SciTech in Aurora. In about five years, the hands-on interactive science museum has grown from the seed of an idea in the brain of a local physicist to be a nationally recognized museum with a half-million-dollar budget. And it’s considered a cultural, educational and economic plum for Aurora, a city on the rebound.
Oh, back to the bubble. Just step on the wooden platform as the directions say and pull a lever to draw a ring up from a container below that holds soapy water. As you tug it up slowly, the bubble forms a transparent cylinder around you, demonstrating the scientific fact that the attraction of the molecules between the soap and the water holds them all together to form the filmy sheet.
And there’s lots more fun in store, as evidenced by the thunderous screams and laughter of school-age children racing from exhibit to exhibit inside the cavernous building that used to be a post office in the center of downtown Aurora on Stolp Island.
A visitor could wonder if anything is being learned here as kids dart from one display to another, but the children swear they are absorbing something. For example, Mark Steffen, 9, of Roselle, a recent visitor, said he had lots of fun, but he also learned about mixing together certain kinds of chemicals and that doing so could cause explosions.
Kendall O’Neill, 14, of LaGrange Park sat on a stool holding a spinning bicycle wheel in her hand. Her friend, Nicki Gerlach, 13, also of LaGrange Park, explained how the spinning motion of the wheel transferred enough energy to spin Kendall around on the stool.
Gerlach said she visits the museum often with her family. She likes the way the exhibits help her to understand the principles she learns at school.
For instance, a plastic rotating model demonstrates the Pythagorean theorem to show that the sum of the squares of two smaller sides of a triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse.
“I didn’t understand it in school,” she said, “but this exhibit shows how it works. I realized this is what they mean.”
Paul Malchow, a scientist at University of Illinois at Chicago, who was also at the museum but with a pack of Oak Park School District students, said the children have fun with the exhibits while on their field trip. But once the students are back in the classroom and settled down again, teachers can use the memories of what the students saw, touched and heard to teach scientific principles.
“It makes learning exciting and intriguing,” he said, explaining that sometimes students want to expand on the experiments they saw at SciTech and perform some of their own at school.
It’s certain that Nicola Watson, 5, of St. Charles will remember the big round spheres shaped like satellite dishes where she could whisper into a ring placed in front of one and converse with her brother, Allan, 6, all the way on the other side of the cavernous room. Nicola may not understand the principles of focused sound used in radio and television waves to transmit messages, but when she learns it in school, she may remember this exhibit at SciTech built by Girl Scout Troop 534.
“School can be so dry,” agreed Mark Tischler, a board member of SciTech who works in software development at AT&T. “SciTech is an informal education tool, and it functions to teach science and math in more of a realistic situation. A lot of times kids are just going to have fun and not always understand the principles. But if they come back often enough, those things will start sinking in and they will learn the exhibits are not just something to play with, but that they can also learn something.”
To teach science and math and to make it fun and available to all age groups is the mission of SciTech in a nutshell. Ernest Malamud, an experimental physicist at Fermilab and the director of the museum, had the brainstorm to open an interactive hands-on science center of this sort in 1982 after he spent a sabbatical at the Exploratorium, a similar institution in San Francisco that was started by Frank Oppenheimer.
“Oppenheimer is frequently given credit for the whole hands-on movement of the ’90s,” Malamud said. “He is a very creative and charismatic person, and he planted the seed in my mind to create a science center to serve the people in this area.”
Malamud knew there was an abundance of creative scientific minds he could draw from, what with the scientists, mathematicians and engineers from Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratories and Bell Laboratories, to name a few of the sources he could tap in the DuPage and Kane County high-tech corridor. And he had an immediate political ally in Jack Knuepfer, then-chairman of the DuPage County Board, who wanted the museum for DuPage County.
“He understood early on the vision of what we were trying to create,” Malamud said, “and he wanted us to have exhibit space in the county buildings.”
So Malamud rounded up some volunteers from the scientific community, and they began to make exhibits in his garage.
“We would have show-and-tell meetings in my living room and try to break each other’s exhibits,” he said, explaining that the displays had to be able to withstand the incredible wear and tear that visitors would subject them to. And they came up with 12 exhibits that were displayed for several months at the DuPage Government Center in Wheaton in 1988.
Malamud soon realized that they needed a bigger place for the exhibits, a place where they could also work on them and be there to explain them to visitors.
At just about that time, DuPage County was organizing its Sesquicentennial, so Malamud set up some of the exhibits at Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle and called in the press and some high-level visitors to introduce his concept for a museum to them. He had such good response that he decided to go out on a limb.
“I told them if we could have a home by the beginning of 1989, I would guarantee we’d be open by May of that year to celebrate the county’s Sesquicentennial.” A local developer came forward with some vacant office space in Naperville, and they had a home, which meant they had to get the exhibits ready.
“We worked feverishly, evenings and weekends, but we got it open with 25 exhibits,” Malamud said.
At that time, the museum was open three days a week, staffed by volunteers. And, as expected, students from local schools started pouring in.
The museum was starting to get the attention of other local leaders, particularly Marie Wilkinson of Aurora, who wanted the museum for her community. She started a one-woman campaign to get the facility in her home town, specifically in the former Aurora post office, a hulking, 37,000-square-foot structure in the classic style that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and that had been bought by the city of Aurora.
“This building was meant to be a museum after it was done being a post office,” she said.
At first, Malamud and the other volunteers couldn’t envision being in the post office. It was too big, and the rent was too high. But when their lease ended in Naperville and they had to find a new spot, the Aurora location suddenly seemed to be a good possibility.
Malamud called an early morning meeting of volunteers and sponsors of the museum at the old post office. He got there at the crack of dawn with his wife, Olivia Diaz, to search for electrical outlets to make coffee.
They set up a circle of chairs in the center of the vast building and waited for people to arrive. About 50 people showed up, a testament to the weight local leaders and scientists placed on the importance of SciTech becoming a reality.
“I remember that morning,” said Patrick LaMaster, a physics teacher at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora who is on SciTech’s board of directors. “We sat on folding chairs in the dusty old building that had just been vacated. We all sat around trying to visualize what it would look like when it was all done. Amazingly, we all sort of saw the same thing.”
The next trick was to convince the city that a museum should be in the building. There had been some talk of having the structure developed into restaurants and shops. A key issue to city leaders, Malamud said, was that they wanted something that would bring people downtown. And he believed that SciTech would do that. So did Wilkinson.
She got on the phone to city aldermen, took them out to lunch and worked one on one to convince them that SciTech was what Aurora needed.
On the day of the final vote, Diaz asked all the aldermen if Wilkinson had talked to them. They all nodded their heads wearily.
“When you have a dream, a lot of people will try to discourage you, but just don’t listen to them,” Wilkinson said.
She didn’t listen to discouragement, and she got the post office for SciTech.
But it would cost them $30,000 in rent for the first year, so they had their work cut out for them to raise that money. Since then, however, the city has reduced the rent to $1 a year.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t expenses. Most of the people who work the floor telling visitors how to use the exhibits are paid, although Diaz would like to see more volunteers do this work. And building exhibits and operating a structure this size eats up a lot of money. Last year’s budget for the museum was $400,000, and next year’s will be $650,000.
A big chunk of the increase in costs is because Malamud will be leaving. Since the beginning, his salary has been picked up by Fermilab, where he is still employed as a physicist, even though most of his hours are at SciTech. The new budget, which is funded largely by corporate and individual donations and grants, will have to reflect the cost of his replacement.
Replacing Malamud will be almost impossible, say those involved with SciTech.
“I don’t even know if Ernie (Malamud) knows what a 60-hour week is, let alone a 40,” LaMaster said. “He’s been president of the board since the beginning and brings a real driving force, plus creative ideas.”
Diaz’s contributions are just as important, Tischler said.
“Olivia is also amazingly energetic, and she keeps the place running, handling a lot of day-to-day things, as well as doing fund raising and writing grant proposals,” Tischler said.
The museum, however, is entering a new phase and perhaps needs a new kind of leadership. Malamud is a creative genius, a constant source of new ideas. But the administrative chores of operating so large a facility are what he would like to turn over to someone else while still being involved with exhibit ideas. He says it’s time for someone else’s vision to be brought in.
John Peoples, the director of Fermilab who was able to wrangle Malamud’s salary from the federal government for the museum, said the entire undertaking and what Malamud has done have been more than worthwhile.
“Ernie got SciTech started, and now it is a valuable institution in Kane County,” he said.
What Malamud sees as important now for the next phase of growth for SciTech is to increase its profile, its outreach and, of course, its economics base to help pay for its programs.
First of all, the people at SciTech want the general public to know that this is a museum not only for children but for families and for adults. Everyone can learn something here, and the displays are fascinating to all ages. For example, it’s just as much fun for a 64-year-old to push the blue button that heats up air to pump into a hot air balloon to make it rise to the ceiling as it is for a 4-year-old. Equally as fun for all ages is the new solar telescope, or the display that measures the speed of a baseball pitch, or obeying the “Please Touch” signs scattered throughout the exhibits.
In addition, as part of its plans, the museum wants to get out into the community by expanding its traveling exhibit programs. With this, staff members called explainers take displays to schools or other places and leave them for a week or so. This program has proven to be cost effective for schools because they pay less to bring exhibits into schools than it costs to take a busload of children to SciTech.
Mary Hinterlong, 2nd-grade teacher at Johnson Elementary School in Aurora, attests to the success of the traveling exhibit program.
“We had the exhibit called `Think Like a Scientist,’ and it was marvelous,” she said. “There were about 12 displays. First the explainer demonstrated the exhibits for the teachers, then the following day came and showed them to the students, and the third day, the children got to do their own hands-on activities.”
Hinterlong is now a big fan of the museum and said she takes her grandchildren there all the time.
“It’s been very beneficial for Aurora,” she said.
“SciTech has been very good for Aurora,” agreed Mayor David Pierce, saying that not only has it helped to put Aurora on the map by bringing in visitors from all over northern Illinois, it has provided a good source of jobs for young people.
But the bottom line for running any successful organization is always money, and Diaz has helped to bring the museum into the big leagues with her newfound grant-writing skills. She has helped the museum to land a $1.2 million grant from the Illinois State Board of Education’s Center on Science Literacy, a $74,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the Museum in a School project, $107,000 from the Institute of Museum Services, and a $95,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the SciTech Club for Girls.
The museum also wants to get more people into the museum, young people for sleepovers and camps, families for special activities, and civic groups to rent the museum for banquets and programs. And, of course, they want more daily visitors.
Right now, attendance at the museum is at about 65,000 a year, and the museum reaches another 35,000 with its outreach programs. But Malamud said the in-house attendance could easily accommodate 150,000 visitors a year.
There are now 268 exhibits, and more are being built every day. In fact, they may soon be looking for more room.
All of this growth is critical, say the people involved with SciTech. As has been highly publicized, the United States is in a race to keep up with other countries technologically. Experts agree U.S. citizens need to stop being afraid of science and math and start learning to love it, to embrace it.
“The United States has to do a gut check,” Tischler said, “and think about how we’re going to compete in the coming decades when our science and math literacy is subpar.”
“Science is one of the most useful subjects a person can learn,” added Murray Peshkin, Argonne scientist who also works as a volunteer at SciTech. “Unfortunately, many people are largely ignorant of science and even intimidated by it. We want to show them what they’re missing and encourage them to learn. The museum is a good way to do that, because it presents the fundamentals and pleasure of learning about the natural world without the tensions of formal education.”
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SciTech, 18 W. Benton St., Aurora, is open noon-5 p.m. Wednesday, Friday and Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Other hours by appointment. Admission: $8 family, $4 adults, $2 children 2-18 and students over 18 with school identification and senior citizens. Group rates are available. 859-3434.
