Partnership with South Dakota State University Creates Out of This World Exhibit
Lunar Life — the Children’s Museum of South Dakota’s newest exhibit — is designed for children and families to learn about space. But it turned out that building the exhibit was a learning experience in itself.
The Lunar Life exhibit features a variety of pods offering hands-on activities related to what life is like in space
Lunar Life drops children into the day-to-day life of an astronaut. They begin by checking in to Command Central to start their adventure.
Then, after donning a flight suit and backpack, child astronauts can explore each pod to learn about growing food, mining, and exercising in space. They can blast off in a rocket simulator and even explore airflow, speed, and pressure at a Bernoulli Table.
As with every exhibit at the Children’s Museum, children learn as they play. Yet, the learning resulting from this exhibit started well before the day it was unveiled.
Lunar Life came to be as a result of South Dakota State University’s Rich Normality Design Collaborative, an interdisciplinary design team of faculty from three different colleges.
This intentional multidisciplinary approach to creating the museum’s traveling exhibit was funded through a grant from the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium and led by a team of SDSU professors over the span of 3 years.
Kay Cutler, professor for early childhood education and one of the faculty to lead the exhibit process, learned that NASA was looking to capture children’s imaginations as it relates to space exploration and discovery. Cutler’s suggestion was to introduce these ideas to children earlier, in early elementary and even preschool.
“If we build these ideas into children’s playthings early on, there’s a greater chance they’ll think about it later and have meaningful experiences that they can go back on when they decide what they want to do in life,” Kay said. “That is something that we are studying with this exhibit now that it is in the hands of children.”
The partnership with the Children’s Museum of South Dakota made sense because of the hands-on, child-led approach to learning but also because the museum did not have an exhibit that featured space exploration.
A young astronaut gets ready to launch a space shuttle in the Lunar Life exhibit.
“Having the exhibit in our space fills a content opening, as our other exhibits do not address space exploration. The multilayered learning that has happened throughout this project is tremendous,” said Mike Mogard, the museum’s director of operations.
The exhibit planning process started in the spring of 2021 with an intense design charrette, a process similar to brainstorming, with the entire disciplinary team of students, faculty, a user, and a client talking through aspects of the design process.
Over the next eight weeks, using a design-thinking framework, the students and team developed ideas, prototyped, and modified the exhibit. They focused on creating a habitat that children could explore in a museum setting.
From those early days, nearly 120 students have touched the project bringing it from concept to completion, including Nick Sieler an SDSU mechanical engineering student who played at the Children’s Museum of South Dakota as a child.
“I hope this new attraction will be able to inspire younger generations to get excited about space like I do now,” Nick said. “I actually wasn’t into space all that much when I was younger, and I think that an exhibit like this one would have hit that interest home sooner.”
While the faculty team is researching to understand what children are taking away from the exhibit, they are equally interested in learning what university students took away from the design thinking process.
“We have a range of data that we hope will help us better understand the student experience, so hopefully we can share with others to apply it to their own context and their own opportunities,” said Craig Silvernagel, associate professor of entrepreneurship & innovation management in the Ness School of Management and Economics.
In the meantime, university students crossed over into each other’s disciplines. Early childhood education majors were using table saws and sanding , while engineering students were fitting the exhibit into fourth-grade education standards. Each student picked up jargon and vocabulary beyond their area of study. University professors even learned how to break and bend aluminum.
“I got a chance to meet students from all over campus that I never would have met without this collaboration,” said Silvernagel.
“I’ve learned things about children’s museums and charettes and things I had never heard of before.”
Even a few short months in, the exhibit is leading to discovery. For example, as one younger boy worked through trial and error to focus the microscope, his focus paid off with one “whoa” after another as he took time to view every single specimen in the exhibit.
Cutler reflected on the experience and how rewarding it was to work with the students whose ideas added to the richness of the project. During the soft opening of the exhibit, she had similar feelings to when the museum opened more than 12 years ago.
“I want [the exhibit] to be memory making,” she said. “I want it to have different layers of experience—for all ages.”
Lunar Life has been a hit with the children and adults who have experienced it. Only time will tell if the children who play with it take their space exploration from the halls of a children’s museum to a career path that could blast them into outer space.
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