Author Archives: Lynsey

About Lynsey

I'm the Participation Coordinator at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. I am passionate about museums and their potential to make a difference in people's lives.

Learning about Leather!

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We are nearing the end of the half-term holiday and we have had some wonderful experts in over the week. Wednesday and Thursday was the turn of two lovely ladies, Rachel and Jeanette, from the Institute of Creative Leather Technologies (ICLT), part of the University of Northampton.

The production of leather and its many uses is a topic featured in the We Made It Gallery, in fact right at the start with the question, “What has a cow got to do with a car?”.

The We Made It Cow!

The We Made It Cow!

Well the answer, of course, is that cowhide is used to make the car’s leather seats, in fact it is the cows butt section that is most used for seats as it is tough and hard waring! As well as cowhide the ICLT also bought in some far more interesting leather samples yesterday, including this elephant ear! This is a very old museum piece and Rachel was quick to point out that the elephant was not killed recently for the skin.

Elephant Ear

Kenny with an elephant ear!

As well as some fascinating leather samples, visitors had a chance to learn about many different aspects of leather production, including how to spot fake leather and inspecting the damage insects can cause. However, the most popular activity by far was the ‘make your own bull’ station! These little leather bulls were tricky to put together but by the end of the day every family in the museum seemed to be carrying one!

Leather Bull

           DIY Leather Bull

The ICLT did a wonderful job of bringing to life this fascinating but perhaps overlooked subject for our visitors. Leather is a product that most of us use but, I certainly, rarely think about how it is produced. As a by-product of the meat industry, the production of leather can be a contentious subject however, as Jeanette explained, it is a process that ensures no part of an animal goes to waste. Apparently it is also a brilliant career move if your thinking of a career in the leather industry! The ICLT will be returning for more Meet the Expert events next year and we are looking forward to having them back!    

 

Meet the Pen Room

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It’s May Half-Term here in grey, rainy Birmingham, which means we are once again running a week of Meet the Expert and Meet the Scientists events.

I have mentioned Meet the Experts before in a previous post but essentially, these are one day events in the museum where a group of volunteers share their expertise with our visitors. Yesterday it was the turn of the Pen Room, a local museum who have also featured in a previous post when we donated them a pen making interactive! The Pen Room celebrates Birmingham’s important history of pen manufacturing, through information and displays of historic pens and the tools used to make them. Located in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, their museum is free and well worth a visit so do pop in!This topic relates well to the We Made It gallery, here at Thinktank, as it also contains displays about pen manufacturing.

The team ran a wonderful day with lots of historic pen nibs on display, dip pens for people to try writing with and even a Braille machine!

Braille Machine

                         Braille Machine

The group also bought their mascot, Nigel Nib, along for the outing! We hope he enjoyed his visit to Thinktank!

Nigel Nib!

                   Nigel Nib!

We are really grateful to the Pen Room for giving up their time and running a lovely event. If you missed them yesterday they will be back in October Half-Term to do it all again!

Ecology goes- Wild About Birmingham!

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A few posts ago I introduced an exhibition Ignite, our Young People’s Forum are working on for the British Ecological Society’s ‘Festival of Ecology’. Now that spring is finally here it feels even more appropriate that we should be turning our attention to the great outdoors!

Ignite have spent the last few weeks working hard to get all their text and images for the exhibition to the designers, and also came up with a new name for it, ‘Wild About Birmingham! Here are a few of the latest concept designs to give a flavor of what the exhibition will look like.

Gardens Section

There are four zones to the exhibition. One focuses on Forests and Gardens.

Welcome Board

The introduction and welcome board.

Story of Wheat Section

One zone focuses on Food and Agriculture.

We are really happy with how the exhibition is starting to look! In fact there were several cries of, “It looks a lot better than I thought it would!” at the last Ignite meeting! The next stage is to create a whole range of family friendly activities to run alongside the show. Ignite have come up with all the idea, now it’s up to me to buy everything while they’re off doing exams! Good luck to all of us!

A Pirate Story Aarrrr!

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We are all getting in the Pirate mood here at Thinktank as we look forward to our summer extraveganza, ‘The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists!: The Exhibition’. The exhibition is packed full of the Aardman Animation sets used in the film (of the same name) as well as interactives, dressing up and even a model Dodo from Oxford University Museum of Natural History. To find out what a Dodo has to do with a Pirate crew you’ll have to watch the film!

As part of our Piratey celebrations we will be running Pirate themed storytelling all summer. To help us come up with the best story possible we invited a group of our Season Ticket holding families to come and write it with us. You may remember we did a similar project with our We Made It Story and it was so much fun we decided to do it again, though without creating a book this time!

Once again we worked with the brilliant storyteller, Anna, who led the group on an adventure to create the characters and plot line for our story.  The kids (and adults!) took part in a whole range of arts and crafts, singing, acting and game playing to get the creative juices flowing. Check out some of their creations below!

The families were wonderful to work with, and reminded us how lucky we are to be surrounded by people who want to give us their time and get involved in our work. Look out for the story once it launches at the end of the month!

Easter Volunteers Year Two!

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We’ve talked about lots of new exciting projects in recent blog posts but today I want to return to an on going ‘We Made It’ project based on providing volunteering roles for local young people.

Our first batch of volunteers joined us last Easter holidays and were so successful that we committed to providing the same opportunities every Easter! This year we again welcomed a group of 16-17 year olds, from Birmingham to join our Gallery Enabler team.These are the people that help our visitors to enjoy the museum as much as possible by running activities, providing directions and talking about the exhibitions.

The group with their certificates

    The group with their certificates

This year we had the added bonus of the We Made It gallery actually being open! The volunteers, therefore, spent a lot of time helping visitors explore this space and running activities. The volunteers also used a brand new activity space on their final day to show visitors lots of handling objects and science demonstrations. Once again we are so impressed with the time and effort these wonderful young people put in whilst at the museum. Here’s to next year!

The Festival of Ecology

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It’s a term you’ve probably come across and think you know what it means but…what exactly is ecology?! Well this year is the centenary of the British Ecological Society (BES) and they want everyone to find out through their ‘Festival of Ecology’, a programme of events taking place all over the country.

Being big fans of the natural world here at Thinktank we decided to get involved in the Festival and celebrate the ecology of our very own city, Birmingham. But instead of the museum staff putting together an exhibition we’ve handed over all control over to our newly established Young People’s Forum, Ignite!

Brainstorming in the first meeting!

Brainstorming in the first meeting!

Ignite are made up of 17, 16-20 year olds from across Birmingham, all working together to produce a Pop-Up exhibition and range of family activities that will go on display this summer. In fact, the exhibition will be traveling all over the city to some of the sites of Birmingham Museums Trust like Aston Hall and Soho House (see full list of dates). Our friends over at Blakesley Hall have been exploring the ecology of their site already and are looking forward to the exhibition visiting them.

So what is the exhibition about? Well, ecology of course, but in particular the group chose to focus on how humans have shaped the ecology of the landscape around them. The displays are split into four key zones; Canals and Ponds, Gardens and Forests, Food and Agriculture and Urban Wildlife, all features found in Birmingham.

So far, Ignite have been working hard carrying out lots of research, writting all the text for the exhibition and choosing lots of images. We were also joined by three scientists from the University of Birmingham who came to tell the group about their own research in areas relating to the exhibition.

Spot scientists who've joined the forum!

Spot scientists who’ve joined the forum!

 

Dr Ian Thornhill and Prof Rob Mackenzie talking with their groups

Dr Ian Thornhill and Prof Rob Mackenzie talking with their groups

The input of Ian, Rob and Emma has been invaluable in making sure the exhibition contains up-to-date research from local universities. In addition, it was wonderful for the group to meet local academics that they would never usually come into contact with.

The group are currently planning a range of exciting family activities as we wait for the exhibition to come back from the graphic designers. We can’t wait to see what it looks like!

So what is ecology?! Well you’ll have to come along and find out!

Celluloid Nights

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Mixologist

Sciencey themed cocktails by Mixologist Luke

A couple of weeks ago Thinktank held its very first adult evening event at the museum in partnership with the Flatpack Film Festival. Together we created an evening celebrating historic cinema and science, with some popcorn, live music and cocktails thrown in just for fun! With the use of celluloid film disappearing from our cinemas the event gave us the opportunity to highlight the importance of plastics in the history of film.

There were some amazing activities throughout the evening that encouraged people to engage with film in all sorts of different ways. From a film processing workshop to a talk on historic plastics there were activities all over the place! There were of course film screenings, from Kino Club and others, but visitors also had the chance to hand make their own piece of film with Unravel. This is a project to create the longest hand painted film in Britain but basically involves relaxing and doing some colouring!  

Visitors handmaking their own film

   Visitors hand making their own film

Hand Made Film

An extract from a horror film?

We also had a light and sound instillation, Lis Rhodes: Light Music, which was previously on show at the Tate Modern. An interesting mix of light, projection and sounds that encouraged people to interact within the instillation. It was certainly unlike anything we have had at Thinktank before (contemporary art not really being our thing!) but it was amazing to have something so different on our galleries.

Light Music

               Light Music Instillation

Finally, the night ended with music from local band ‘Heath and Efficency’ who closed out the evening along with projections of footage created on the night. Overall, it was a really successful and enjoyable event and we hope everyone who came along has a great time! Who knows, maybe we’ll do it again next year!

Health and Efficency

               Health and Efficiency

Making New Friends

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Welcome to the newly re-purposed Thinktank Blog!

Now that most of the We Made It projects are drawing to a close we have decided to give the blog a wider focus and cover as much of our work as possible. Expect to see lots about our volunteers, new partners, new projects, the work of our visitors and anything else we can fit in! As always, please get involved by commenting and sharing as much as you like.

We’ll kick off by covering a few of the events we have run recently with new partners (or to use a nicer word, friends!) to the museum. We are lucky to have so many wonderful people and organisations that want to come to Thinktank and run events for our visitors. Two such organisations are the Assay Office and the Aluminium Federation who both came in to run ‘Meet the Expert’ days over the February Half-Term holiday. Both were extremely popular events with visitors learning all about hallmarking, jewellery making, aluminium production and getting some nice aluminium wrapped chocolate coins!

Aluminium Federation

                 Aluminium Federation

Dr Alan from Alfed!

      Dr Alan from Alfed!

It is exciting for us as a museum to be able to provide our visitors with opportunities to meet professionals like these that they may not usually be able to talk to.

In the same week we also welcomed over 60 students from the University of Birmingham who ran ’Meet the Scientist’ activities all over the museum, covering everything from fluid dynamics to stick insects! Here’s some of the happy bunch that joined us from the School of Biosciences, it must be early on in the day as they are all smiling and full of energy!

Meet the Scientists

                    Meet the Scientists

We also welcomed around 40 students from the Physical Sciences of Imaging in the Biomedical Sciences (PSIBS) Doctoral Training Centre (try saying that fast!) who virtually took over the museum! Here’s some of the activities they brought along to help explain their research to our visitors.

 

Thank you to all our new friends for adding to the experience we can provide for our visitors. Look out for lots more posts in the next few weeks about other people and projects at Thinktank!

Finishing Things!

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What a hectic few weeks for the We Made It team! So much so I have rather neglected the Blog at the very point at which exciting things are happening! My sincere apologies. I hope to make up for it with a few posts rounding some of the projects off.

Firstly, the Gallery! Officially open to our visitors on Saturday 16th February 2013 (tomorrow if you are reading this today!) the We Made It Gallery is looking wonderful. As with all new galleries, we have been in a period of snagging and testing for the past week to make sure all the exhibits and interactives are functioning as they should. This is an extremely time consuming process and can even involve large scale changes right at the last minute! Sometimes it’s only when a display is insitu that we can see whether or not it fits perfectly. 99% of the time our planning pays off and everything is fine but occasionally alterations do need to be made. Hopefully everything should be perfect for tomorrow (with some crossing of figures!) but a gallery is an evolving space so will change based on our visitors needs.

Here’s an array of photos of We Made It looking its very best! If you have a chance to visit do let us know what you think.