Sci-Port Exhibit Area Descriptions
The Lobby
Ball Machine: Watch a specific ball. How many different tracts are there in one section? In the whole machine?
Vertical Wave: Create fascinating vibrations running along a 40-foot tall oscillating column. Can you make an echo?
Gravity Well: Your students can roll coins around an inverted cone. The coin’s path, projected on a horizontal plane, simulates the orbits of the planets.
Red River Gallery
The Red River Gallery focuses on the science most unique to our region, featuring the many threads of nature – the river, the land and the wildlife – and of human settlement – the life, the agriculture, the trade and industry.
THE RUN OF THE RED….From Source to Mouth
Red River Aquarium: Encounter the life of the Red River—a 10-foot, 860-gallon aquarium highlights the ecosystem and indigenous fish of the river. What fish do you see here? Describe an adaptation of one of the fish.
The Red Flyer: Use chromakey technology to see yourself “flying” over the Red and the nearby countryside and cities with views of meanders, oxbows, and the flood plain.
Map of Louisiana: Put the puzzle together. Where do you live? What river is close to you?
Big Rambling Red: Use this stream table with water running over sand to erode banks and generate meanders, just like the real river.
Locks and Dams: Move a model boat from a lower to a higher pond and use dams to adjust water levels in the two “river” sections.
The Archimedes II: On this fanciful riverboat, you can steer and whistle in the wheelhouse, be the “engine” and turn the paddlewheel, pump the bilges, and lift cotton with a derrick.
PRODUCTS FROM THE SOIL….Forest and Farm
Count the Years: Examine a large section of a cypress tree; count the rings to determine the tree’s age.
Cotton Gin: Participate in a demonstration of the ginning process; after separating seeds from cotton lint, you may take a sample with you.
Cotton Bale: Lift the bale. How heavy is it? How many acres of cotton does it take make a bale of cotton?
LIFE AROUND THE RED….Flora and Fauna
Aaron & Peggy Selber Red River Interactive Theater: Enjoy a memorable 15-minute film that will immerse you in the power and influence of the river on our lives. Using objects, sound and projected images, the Theater demonstrates past and present relationships of the Red River to the land forms, the flora, and fauna.
A Different View and 3-D Map: Interpret images from above – stereo pictures, satellite images, infrared color-coded, radar images, or thermal scans.
Staying Alive: Get a close-up view of Louisiana animal life in a variety of terrariums and aquariums. Sci-Port’s biologists will bring these animals out for a close encounter of the “natural” kind! You will see a variety of amphibians and reptiles. How are they different? How are they similar?
Busy Bees: Observe our living beehive. Can you find the Queen? How is the Queen different from worker bees? This exhibit is seasonal only available in the spring.
Donald E. Hataway Activity Pier: Pull the handle to see the record fish caught in Louisiana. What is the state record for a white bass?
OIL and Gas First In….The South
Field Pump: View a “nodding donkey” which simulates the pumping of oil from an underground reservoir.
Oil Equipment: Examine a travelling block, hook and swivel assembly with a variety of drill bits on display.
Drill Core Xylophone: Strike pieces of drill core; as the tone of the ring is picked up and amplified, the different pitches and timbres represent different physical properties.
Geophone: Raise a capped steel tube and pound it downward once to thump into the ground. See the initial blow and the echo returns of an oscilloscope trace from a nearby geophone, similar to seismic surveying.
Spongy Rocks: Three reversible tubes can be rotated to illustrate how oil flows through formations of different porosity.
Electric Log: Track the geological profile of the area from the surface. Although at first sight this may look like a piece of art, it holds many scientific gems telling the story of the region over the past several million years.
Viscosity: Find out what viscosity is and why it is important. Can you give an example of viscosity from your own experience?
GEOLOGY….What Our Land Is Made Of
Rocks of Louisiana: Explore the rocks of Louisiana. What are they and where do they come from?
Glow Rocks: Look at the phosphorescent rocks. Why do they glow? Do you know anything else that is phosphorescent?
Rock On: Identify three classes of rocks. Can you give an example of each?
Petrified Palm Wood: See the Louisiana State Fossil and find out how it is formed.
Rocks and Mineral Display: Identify samples as a rock, mineral, or fossil. Ask a pilot for a field guide to help you.
Fossil Dig/Fossil Hunt: Can you identify the fossils here. Uncover fossils in a simulated dig. What organisms that live today are related to the fossil you found? This exhibit is gone to the Fix-It Shop.
Schumpert Bodyworks Gallery
The human body is an entry point that interests people in the world of living things.
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY….What It Is and How It Works
Anatomy and physiology/ sports and fitness clusters
Mr. Bones: A human skeleton pedals on a bicycle. Watch Mr. Bones legs, what joints are involved in pedaling?
Step Test: Measure your heart rate before and after stepping up and down on a stool and compare the effect to standards for the exercise.
Grip Strength: Measure your grip strength.
Balance: Grip the handle get your balance and then let go. How long could you balance? Challenge a friend. What occupations do you suppose depended on a good ability to balance?
Blood Pressure: Check your blood pressure
Reaction Speed: Measure the time it takes to press a button after a light flashes.
Netmania: See how many soccer balls you can block.
Measure Up: How much do you weigh in kilograms? How tall are you? What is BMI?
Jump Test: Find your vertical leap.
Blood Pressure: Find your blood pressure with this exhibit.
Beating Heart: Grasp the two electrodes of a pulse sensor, a realistic rubber heart starts beating synchronously.
Head on a Platter: When your student puts his/her head up through a hole in a platter on a tabletop, his/her head appears to be disembodied on the platter.
Pitch Speed: A radar monitor measures the speed of your pitch. Have a contest with your friends
Lungs: Expand and contract the chest cavity on a model to see how the lungs react.
Hunting for a Vowel: Transform the “blat” of a duck call into recognizable vowel sounds by feeding it into various artificial larynx sections.
Build a Skeleton: Take apart a colorful layered puzzle of the human body and replace the organs, bones, and muscles one layer at a time.
Artificial Joints: What kind of joints do you see in this exhibit? Where are they located?
Mr. Torso: Remove and replace the internal organs of a plastic model. Where is your liver, stomach, heart?
Bone Junctions: How many ways can you connect these bones? Can you describe a joint and what are some types of joints?
X-ray Puzzle: Use comparative skills to assemble different x-ray images of a whole person. Identify the skeletons of a variety of animals.
Heavy Load: Apply stress to a photoelastic plastic section shaped like a femur. See the strain pattern and compare it with the real sectioned femur beside it. The real femur has internal strengthening structures just where the strain develops.
THE BRAIN….The Control System
The perception and genetics cluster
Strobe Wheels: Just like hub caps on your car, these simple exhibits help explore how the eye interprets rotating motion.
Reversing Words: Mirror images of some words still look the same.
Anamorphic Images: Twisted and distorted images start making sense with some simple cylindrical mirrors. This exhibit shows our brain’s dependence on pattern recognition.
The Never Ending Hallway-Look inside the big blue box. What do you see? Is it real or an illusion? Why?
Moire Patterns: Put one piece of transparent material with a pattern on it over another. Do you see a new pattern.?
Move the material slightly, what kind of changes appear in the pattern?
Pretty Lady?: Is she young or old? This puzzling image can be both, it depends on your point of view (literally).
Face or Vase: What do you see? Close your eyes, look again. Is it the same?
Tessellations: A tessellation is a repeating pattern composed of interlocking shapes (usually polygons) that can be extended infinitely. What changes take place in this tessellation?
Circles and Squares: Which circle is larger? Which square is larger? Check your answer
Art or Math?: For some, Mathematics is art -- it is the symmetry and patterns that characterize Escher’s artwork at the very boundary of science and art.
Trace Me: Try to run the stylus along the outline only guided by the mirror. Is it easy or hard? Why?
Genetic Traits: This exhibit describes nine genetic traits. What form of each of these traits do you have?
Check Your Prints: Examine your fingerprints under a microscope and compare them to common forms.
DNA-The Language of Life: Where is DNA found and what shape does it have?
Impossible Shapes: Clever drawings of geometrical shapes that the eye takes for granted, once examined, are quickly found to be impossible to exist in nature.
Zoetrope: A strip of cartoon images inserted into a cylinder is animated when you turn the cylinder. Your students may draw their own cartoon strips to animate.
Physical Sciences Gallery
MECHANICS….What Makes the World Go Round
These exhibits are found on the lobby balcony.
Bed of Nails: Sleeping about 3000 very sharp nails (4” long), your students will perform some physics magic themselves.
These exhibits are found near the Tornado
Rising Bubbles: Pump air bubbles into the bottom of a column of viscous liquid and watch them rise slowly. notice that the bubbles are spheroids (surface tension), that they rise (flotation), and that large bubbles catch up with small ones (Stokes’ law).
Angular Momentum: Sit on a turning stool and hold a spinning bicycle wheel by two handles fixed to its axle. Tilting the axis of rotation causes you to turn around a vertical axis.
Ned Kahn Art-Science: These sculptures engage students in the beauty of the forces in our physical world: Tornado (found in Physical Sciences Gallery), Turbulent Orb (in the Lobby Balcony outside the IMAX)), Turbulent Sea (in the Lobby Balcony) and Chaotic Pendulum (in the Lobby Balcony)
This exhibit is found near the Cynthia George Wood Science Corner.
Domino Table : Working together, students overcome many obstacles caused by Newton’s Laws of Motion to complete a network of domino pieces.
MACHINES and STRUCTURES….The Muscles and Bones of Technology
Big Pulleys: Students can pull themselves up using single, double, or triple pulleys and compare the effort required for each.
Big Lever: Lift a car motor using a giant lever; slide a rope loop along the lever to adjust the length of the effort arm.
This exhibit is found right outside Children’s Gallery.
Pump Yourself Up: Students sitting in a chair lift themselves off the ground with a transparent hydraulic cylinder.
ENergy….It’s Not Matter!
ELECTRICITY and MAGNETISM CLUSTER Core Tools of the Modern World
Voltage Divider: Slide the contact of a rheostat and see the light bulbs wired between the slider and the ends change in intensity; balance the lights; meters show how the voltages are changing.
Polar Power-Electric Wand: Move the bar back and forth through the coil. What happens? Why?
Polar Power-Magnetic Force: Push the button. What happens? Why?
Polar Power-Motors: Push the button. What happens? Why?
Polar Power-Generators: Crank the handle on the right. Crank the handle on the left. How are they different? What do they do? Why?
Plasma Tower: Touch a glowing tube of gas. The glow intensifies and reaches toward your fingers.
Series and Parallel Circuits: Wire up bulbs and other circuit elements in series and parallel circuits and observe the effects.
Bulbs and Batteries: Your students can connect bulbs and batteries to light up the bulbs.
Magnetic Attraction and Repulsion: Push the left button. What happens? Have you ever seen something like this before? Push the center button. Put the compass on top of the coil and observe. Move the compass away from the coil and move the rods back and forth. How is the compass different from before? Why?
What’s a Watt?: Pedal a bicycle generator; select a light bulb, hand drill or hair dryer to power by yourself.
Horsepower: Crank the engine. How much horsepower do you generate?
Jumping Ring: When you push the button, an electric charge causes an aluminum ring to leap up into the air.
Jacob’s Ladder: Send a high voltage charge between two metal rods to see electrical ionization.
LIGHT CLUSTER Familiar, but Strange
Everyone Is You and Me: Two people face each other through half-silvered glass and control the light levels on their own sides; the image is a combined face.
Shadow Wall: Your shadow is “printed” on a phosphorescent wall by a strobe light.
FLIGHT…Fulfilling Dreams
Fly the Plane: Control a small model airplane inside a wind tunnel. You control the wind speed, elevators, rudder and ailerons.
Balancing Act: A beach ball is suspended over a flexible cone blowing air upwards. Students can test the ability of the ball to stay in the air by moving and bending the flexible cone.
Bernoulli Funnel: You are challenged to lift a beach ball with a length of hose that blows air out.
MATH…Explains the World!
This exhibit is found on the lobby balcony. There are 20+ math exhibits with in our new Space Expansion!
Pythagorean Theorem: In this 3-D version of a right triangle, movable blocks from the large square of the triangle’s hypotenuse fill the two smaller squares on the right angle sides of the triangle.
Technology Gallery
COMMUNICATION and INFORMATION…On the Cutting Edge
Focusing Dishes: Two large parabolic dishes, about 6 feet in diameter, face each other across the exhibition space. Students speaking and listening at the foci can hear each other clearly across the noisy expanse.
Face Morphing: Edit your face by stretching or compressing different areas of your image.
Internet Stations: Students can use our new Internet stations to access websites providing additional information concerning many topics encountered in the science center. This exhibit area launches visitors on an infinite journey of information available from sources throughout the world.