The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, October 12, 1993 - 7 Kelsey Museum provides traveling artifacts M By MEGAN SCHIMPF FOR THE DAILY Eureka! The University's Kelsey Museum of Archeology will have a new traveling educational kit made possible by a $4,000 grant from Detroit Edison. The kit, to be called "Eureka! Inventions Old and New," will fea- 0ture ancient inventions, including safety pins and automatic door open- ers. It will circulate to area schools. "We want to alert kids to the fact §that people have been inventing for years," said Lauren Talalay, curator of education at Kelsey. "The safety pin is 4,000 years old and the An- cient Greeks had automatic door openers." The kit will include books, slide shows, videos, computer games, board games, replicas, and other educational activities. It will also come with a teacher's manual on how to use the kit. Kelsey is looking to interest stu- dents who are not usually excited by science. "We're hoping there are enough hands-on activities that people who are normally turned off by science will go through another gateway," Talalay said. "We're hop- ing there are enough hooks." The kits, however, are aimed at ,all kids. Talalay said the purpose of the program is "to instill creativity in children, inspire them to think more scientifically and mathemati- cally, and for fun, because ancient inventions are neat." Talalay said she wants children to advance their thinking, but also learn about the past. "We're hoping that because in- ventions are tied to logical prob- lem-solving that we'll stimulate that %process and way of thinking. We'd like to help them think critically and help them feel connected to the ',past," she said. Detroit Edison, a public utility company, has a contribution budget made up of funds that would other- wise be given to stockholders in the form of dividends. The company transfers the funds to The Detroit Edison Foundation, a division headed by a separate board of direc- tors; to distribute. The Foundation receives about 1,500 applications a year and then gives out $4 million in grants to selected groups. "It's a function of a company to be responsive to the community. It's a way to give back to the com- munity," said Kay Hunt, secretary of the foundation and administrator of corporate contributions. Hunt said Kelsey was chosen for the grant because of the emphasis on education in its program. "This was a program that ben- efits both the University and the local school district. A lot of stu- dents will benefit from this grant," said Hunt. "We wanted to increase what we're doing in education and shift the focus to younger kids." The invention kit will be avail- able by next September and will be !the 12th kit in the Kelsey program. The themes of the kits range from Ancient Egyptians to Greek My- thology to Ancient Romans, and are rented out for 10-day periods at a cost of $20, used to maintain the kits. Talalay said the kits have been successful in Michigan and have been featured in Archaeology Maga- zine. She estimated that about 6- ,7,000 kids used the kits last year, but said that the actual figure might be as high as 10,000. The kits will primarily be used by local schools, but are available for rent to anyone. They are de- signed for grades K-12, but are usu- ally used by grades 4-9, Talalay said. One University class, Classical Archeology 221, Introduction to Greek Archaeology, will be using the kits in the future. Prof. John Pedley, who teaches the class, said he will use the kits to introduce his :lasses to the materials since the Kelsey Museum itself is not avail- able due to renovations. R e a ......................................... ores o'lb X.sin ou::: "I want students to have access to the materials," said Pedley. "I think the suitcases are an excellent way to get objects out of the mu- seum and making them accessible to the general public." Pedley said he hopes the stu- dents, mainly first-year students and sophomores, will gain a deeper un- derstanding of the material they are learning by seeing the replicas. "They will have a direct contact with the world of antiquity. Other- wise, all they do is see them on slides, which are two-dimensional." Last year, 12 University under- graduates participated in an experi- mental program that brought the kits to pediatric wards atUniversity Hos- pitals. The students helped children who were in the hospital briefly for surgery to spell their names in hi- eroglyphics using stamps from the Ancient Egyptian kit. Talalay said she would like to continue to ex- pand the program in the future. The new kit will not contain ac- tual artifacts because of insurance and ethical reasons. Most of the present kits also contain only repli- cas, but the Ancient Roman kit does have an authentic spoon and piece of tile. "We can't take anything out of the museum," Talalay said. "I would love to have real artifacts, but we can't for insurance reasons." The new inventions kit will range from writing to the Roman era, which Talalay estimates to be from 3000 B.C. to 300 A.D. It will in- clude Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern inventions, and will be almost uniformly Mediterranean in content. "The nature of Kelsey is that we're a collection of Mediterranean works. We had to draw the line somewhere, so we stuck with what we had in the museum," Talalay said. She said if another invention from beyond the Mediterranean at- tracts their attention, kit creators will also include it. Using the present kits, students can design and build a Roman arch, write their names using hieroglyph- ics stamps, read and write using pictorial writing, do puzzles using Ancient Summarian math, or de- sign their own Egyptian good luck charm or Greek vase. While the new kit is still being planned, Talalay said being able to make an ancient safety pin and de- signing a Roman voting machine using black and white marbles are possibilities. Kelsey has also recently received a grant from the Ann Arbor Area Community Organization for a kit to be called Ancient Problems in the Modern World. It will deal with issues people have to address today, such as homelessness, diversity and disease. "These are not contemporary phenomena," Talalay said. "They were just as pressing for the ancient people. We can learn from their fail- ures and their successes." Talalay estimated that the kits will last for 10-20 years, as long as there is someone at Kelsey to main- tain and update them. The kits are also referred to as "Ancient Civilizations in a Crate" or "Traveling Suitcases." Detroit Edison grants are tax- deductible for the company once the money has been transferred to the foundation. ,WellComeStudents: "T your hair isn't becoming to you, you should be coming to us." *Liberyoff State 668WA9T2G DANIEL KRAUSSID.Jy Kelsey Museum cumtor Lauren Talalay displays ancient inventions from the kit; ST. MARY'S STUDENT PARISH announces a Lecture Catholic and AcademiC A Contradiction in Terms? by Professor James Turner History Department, University of Michigan Wednesday, October 13,7:00 p.m. at the Newman Center 331 Thompson Street The first in a series of presentations on faith and thought and the interplay between a Catholic religious commitment and the profession of teacher and intellectual. Open to allnterested students, faculty and others. - dJ 4 NL~er~ jou' D fy GOLLEM OWL. Intramural Quiz Game Registration/Ranking Quiz Michigan Union October 12 Kuenzel Room 7-10 pm October 13 Pendleton Room 7-10 pm North Campus Commons October 13 East Room 6-10 pm Quiz Takes 1 Hour - Stop by Any Time! vi Jotenlfs (o ro4 Anf,.,.As. C1o/I Ee k & r1