Exploration Place celebrates reopening by building an elaborate, museum-wide Mouse Trap
Update: Exploration Place posted the video of the final product on Tuesday. See it at the end of this story.
You scroll past them on social media all the time — elaborate Mouse Trap game-style layouts that arrange stacked and balanced everyday items so that, when the first item topples, an amazing chain reaction starts that topples the rest.
Those setups have a name. They’re called Rube Goldberg machines, named after an American cartoonist who drew a strip in the early 1920s and 1930s that often depicted such inventions.
Those setups also have lots of fans, and among them is the staff of Exploration Place, the Wichita children’s museum at 300 N. McLean that’s been closed amid coronavirus concerns since March 13.
Now, the museum is about to reopen. Members can return starting on Wednesday, and the museum opens to the public on July 4. As they brainstormed ways to celebrate and mark the reopening in a big way, director Adam Smith and the staff had a big idea.
Why not create a massive Rube Goldberg machine inside the museum — one that would span the whole building and incorporate the kind of science experiments that get young minds working? It could be the biggest. The best. The most amazing thing anyone had ever seen.
“Whenever people post those videos online, they seem to get huge viewership, and we thought it was right for our mission,” Smith said. “It’s something that we can do while we’re closed that we could never do while we’re open.”
And they pulled it off — for the most part. Early next week, the museum will post on its social media channels the result of their efforts.
Over a five-day period, the staff and a group of volunteers created a massive Rube Goldberg machine that included 140 steps, was about a half a mile long and was spread out over 40,000 square feet inside the museum.
It was designed by Michael Downs, a well-known scenery and lighting designer who lives in Wichita, and it had just about everything going for it — whimsical items like umbrellas, bowling balls and kayaks, the passion of 30 volunteers who worked nonstop to make it happen, and the space to spread out in the museum during a rare time when there were no visitors.
But as the staff found out when it tried to run the thing and film the results on Wednesday evening, the project was lacking one thing: sufficient time to work out the kinks.
A few steps just wouldn’t work, and as any fan of Rube Goldberg machines know, even one faulty step will trip up the whole endeavor.
After running it several times — the thing took six minutes to fall and a full half-hour to reset — and failing to correct the spots that kept glitching, the staff decided that it just wasn’t going to happen.
In researching, they learned that much less complicated setups can take up to three months to perfect. But they didn’t have three months: The museum was rented for events over this weekend and the machine had to be gone.
They still filmed the process, but they’ll edit the steps together so viewers can enjoy a fluid viewing experience.
“We’re still calling it a win,” said Christina Bluml, the museum’s director of marketing. “It’s quite a feat in and of itself to do the Rube Goldberg at the level that we did. It’s massive.”
The video, when it’s posted, will still be worth watching.
The machine, which the museum paid for with $3,500 in grant money from the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, is creative, colorful and visually satisfying.
It was launched at the museum’s swinging pendulum, which toppled a tile that released a helium balloon that tripped a wire that hit a globe that swung into trash can pyramid that fell on a seesaw that raised a board that knocked over a cutout that fell into a plank that hit some billiards balls that....
The machine traveled from the pendulum down the promenade through the main lobby over the bridge into the Design Build Fly exhibit through the KEVA room down the hall through the Kansas In Miniature exhibit down the grand hall into the traveling Imaginate exhibit all the way around to the big play castle up through the grand hall and back over the bridge to the lobby, where the final step tripped a big celebratory light show.
As it traveled, the machine performed several surprising tricks. It released an actual smart car that rolled down a ramp and led to Mentos falling into bottles of Diet Coke, which created a powerful fizz that traveled through tubes and launched another part of machine.
There was a flying kayak, rolling bowling balls, a toy airplane that zipped along a string and set pieces of luggage rolling down a track, snapping rat traps, blowing fans, floating umbrellas, lab coats moving on pulleys and a rolling skateboard. The train that travels the track in the Kansas in Miniature exhibit even had a role.
The designers went through bags and bags of zip ties, rolls and rolls of string and pounds and pounds of dry wall and deck screws.
Though the volunteers are disappointed they didn’t have more time to make the machine work as it was designed, they’re still proud of what they did, Bluml said.
And thinking big is part of Exploration Place’s whole mission, director Smith said.
“We built all kinds of science experiments into it so that, as we go on this crazy journey through Exploration Place, we’re reminding people of all the fun, cool exhibits we’ve got here,” he said.
This story was originally published June 27, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
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