Back
  •  
     

    Sustainable Future gallery exhibits for children

    Roper Mountain Science Center, USA -

    The Roper Mountain Science Center in the USA needed a selection of permanent interactive exhibits, localised to the region in South Carolina, for its new science centre that would teach its thousands of annual visitors about sustainability and be particularly attractive and engaging for children to use


  • Sustainable Future gallery exhibits for children

    For its new Environmental Science and Sustainability Building, the Roper Mountain Science Center in Greenville, South Carolina, USA, wanted to install a collection of interactive exhibits in its Sustainable Future gallery that would teach children about sustainability by exploring topics such as recycling, wastewater treatment, and local ecosystems.

    The Roper Mountain Science Center selected suitable exhibits from formula D_'s product catalogue and then worked with formula D_ to customise and localise the content in each exhibit to reflect, for example, the flora, fauna, and biodiversity in the region.

    The Biodiversity 3D exhibit teaches children about how their actions affect their environment in positive or negative ways. They can pull up tabs, with labels such as "water garden during the heat of the day" or "buy organic food", and watch an animation of the ecosystem they see around them in real life in Greenville change as a result of the action.

    The Waste Wall installation presents a selection of common items found at the supermarket, such as food items sold in packaging, various types of clothing, and home-cleaning products. Visitors can use the exhibit's bar-code scanner to scan the
    code on each item to see how the item affects the waste problem in Greenville and what parts of it ends up in a landfill.

    The Water Wall touch projection presents an animated plumbing system full of leaking pipes and dripping taps. Children have to work together to fix as many leaks as they can in order to fill up a water savings tank.

    The 3D Cityscape Energy Exhibit combines 3D projections with touchscreen devices to offer an interactive model that demonstrates energy planning in a city. Children need to make decisions about the planning in the model city and then will see in real time what affect their choices have. The exhibit explores different kinds of energy, such as solar and coal, and different systems that require electricity, such as heating and lighting. A key learning point is the tradeoff between cost and environmental effect.

    formula D_ also customised and built a localised version of the Interactive Visitor Orientation Map informational exhibit for the centre, which is a top-down physical model of the geographic area that is combined with a digital projection that can be animated and which is operated via a touchscreen device.