Students find center intriguing

If you are Warren County Middle School sixth-grader, what’s the best way to spend a President’s Day holiday from the classroom? How about an immersion in science, like how the human body works, the physics of music, the chemistry of food, and a ball game controlled only by brain waves?

A trio of WCMS classmates, Brooke Scott, Rachel Tieman and Bliss Zechman, explored the inner workings of the body and tested Newton’s First Law of Motion during a visit last Monday to the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, one of America’s premier showcases for fun-filled encounters with the basic laws of nature. Their unanimous verdict on the experience: “Awesome!”

The three sixth-graders also explored concepts of visual perception and mental imaging, and how what appears to the mind as a real object may not actually be there at all. The local students toured the interior of an 11-foot-tall model of the human brain, complete with fiber optic nerves that snaked through much of the 9000-square-foot BodyQuest exhibit. From the cerebral to the visceral, the local visitors crawled through a super-sized model of the large intestine, finally sliding out to land on whoopee cushion as big as a car hood.

BodyQuest’s interactive demonstration of the heart and circulatory system allowed Brooke, Rachel and Bliss to try their hand at manually pumping fluid at a rate equal to that of the human heart; they all came up short. A water-raceway demo of human blood circulation gave the trio a chance to test the effects of cigarette smoking and stroke-hazards tied to consumption of unhealthy fats in our diet.

Kids who like to play the claw machine, trying to grab a stuffed toy, are thrilled with BodyQuest’s Big Catch, a giant robotic hand and wrist each of whose individual fingers is controlled by an exhibit visitor. If all five players work well as a team, they can grasp a huge rubber ball dangling from the ceiling. The exposed steel structure and hydraulic cylinders in Big Catch drive home the point that muscles only contract, so that extension motions of the skeletal system depend on bones acting as levers.

Moving on from the $5 million BodyQuest to the Adventure Tower, Brooke, Rachel and Bliss crawled through tunnels and scaled a mammoth spinal column in exploring seven levels of exhibits on air and space, energy, earth science and sound and light.

The 75-foot-tall structure soars from the ground level literally through the roof of the museum, offering an inspiring view of the Nashville skyline and the adjacent Fort Negley, built by the Union Army to defend its gains in Middle Tennessee during the Civil War.

The Warren County Middle School students are looking forward to a repeat visit to the Adventure Science Center in May 2008, when the Sudekum Planetarium, a Nashville astronomy-teaching landmark for more than 50 years, re-opens in a vastly expanded version with state-of-the art technology and visual thrills. The $20 million project will eventually include a Sky & Space Wing, enclosing 12000 feet of display space, 30 original displays and 63 interactive stations.

Organizers and supporters of the project predict the facility will be “one of the premier planetariums in the country,” boosting Nashville’s worldwide stature as a center of scientific education.

A private, non-profit educational institution, the Adventure Science Center is open Monday through Saturday 10 am – 5 p.m. and Sunday 12:30 – 5:30 p.m.. The facility offers extended evening hours on Fridays and Saturdays from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Admission is $9 for adults, $7 for children ages 3-12, and $7 for seniors. Annual membership plans are available providing free admission anytime.

The center is located at 800 Fort Negley Boulevard, with easy access from I-65 and I-24. For information on admission, hours and services: 615.862.5160 or www.adventuresci.com.