District contributes to Science Museum's Big Back Yard

This past June the Science Museum of St. Paul launched a new outdoor fun-and-learning space called the Big Back Yard. Since the new museum on the river opened in December 1999, says Patrick Hamilton, director of environmental and earth system sciences, it very much wanted to “fund an outdoor science park, where visitors can have as much fun and learn as much as they do inside.”

In partnership with the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics, at the U of M, and many contributors, including the District, the museum constructed a science park that includes

A nine-hole mini-golf course and related exhibits
A solar-powered building called Science House that’s used as a classroom and lab space
A series of rainwater gardens that receive stormwater runoff
A maze planted with prairie grasses and flowers, to which next year will be added full interpretive signs

Source-to-sink educational fun & games

From opening day, visitors have been both informed and energized by the Big Back Yard. The theme of the mini-golf course, for example, is “source to sink.” “Landscapes erode,” says Hamilton , “rivers transport sediment, and the sediment ends up in ocean basins.” As players putt their way through the course, they have fun and at the same time learn about human interactions with the landscape.

Visitors are giving positive feedback, reports Hamilton. They’re having fun and learning at the same time, in keeping with the mission of the Science Museum and the experience of inside-the-museum visitors over time. “For most people that visit here,” he says, “learning is fun. Playing is productive, and they learn about real-world processes and their consequences.”

The golf course does not feature the “fanciful or fantastic landscape,” says Hamilton, that the player may be used to from playing mini-golf. Rather, it’s realistic, scientific, heuristic — a landscape true to nature and instructive of how water-forces work on the land.

Hole 3, for example, features a spillway on a dam. As the water rolls down the spillway in a fast, thin layer, it hits slower moving, deeper water at the bottom and forms a “hydraulic jump,” a turbulent area that players must putt across. Hole 4, which boasts a large culvert, tells the story of urban stormwater pollution. Hole 6 teaches about pervious and impervious urban landscapes, and dramatizes just how fast urban flash-floods can be, since so much surface has been paved or built over.

On hole 6, as on all holes, the pin, ingeniously, is plumbed to the rainwater gardens down the slope. So, the putter himself or herself plumbs the connection between input, we might say, and output — whether these forces are a golf ball or a volume of water.

Life lessons

How can a player get through the course and just not get it? If he dumps oil down a drain, this pollutant gets into the groundwater, rolls downstream, and affects life along the way. If she tosses fast food refuse out the window of her car, this trash also gets in our waterways, posing a hazard to wildlife and spoiling the natural landscape.

Besides the nine holes of golf, the course is planted with exhibits that dramatize water dynamics.

One exhibit, in a large plexiglass tank, demonstrates how dams trap sediment in their reservoirs. The player/learner cranks up the dam gate, and the sand spills downstream fast, building up a delta. When he lowers the gate, the sediment builds up before our eyes. This is a real-life, hands-on demonstration of the aquatic forces that have prevented fish like salmon from migrating upstream and filled reservoirs with sediment.

Hole 8, a schematic model of St Anthony Falls, continues the hydraulic lesson. Tons of engineering, over the last 150 years, suggests Hamilton, have changed the shape and contour of the river. First, snags and logs were pulled out to make the river more navigable. Then, in the late 19^th century, thousands of wing dams, composed of layers of willow mats and stone, were installed, like those on the north side of the falls, to scour the river bottom and constrain flow to one central channel. Then, in the 1930s, lock and dam systems began to be built.

Near the end of the course, there’s a fun flume exhibit where players can pan for gemstones and fossils. They buy a bag, empty the contents into a sieve box and shake out sand into the rushing water of the flume. Their winnings may not reach Power Ball magnitude, but they get to keep the mineral or fossil fragment that they find.

Stay tuned for next April

Eager to play and learn? Alas, the mini golf course closed for the season in early October. But it will reopen next April: the plants on the steep slopes and around the golf holes will bloom again; the rainwater gardens will blossom; and the prairie maze, complete with interpretive signage, will infiltrate all of us with the sense of just how lucky we are to live in such a time and place where the river lies just below, the skies open immensely up above, and we can re-create ourselves like nature.

For more information on the Big Back Yard, go to the Science Museum's web site at http://www.smm.org/bigbackyard/.