The National Medal for Museum and Library services is the nation’s highest honor for
libraries and museums that are serving their communities in exciting ways.
EdVenture Children’s Museum director Catherine Wilson Horne and community member Noah Charles
Aitchison Adams and his mom, Mary Aitchison traveled to Washington to receive the national
medal and spoke to IMLS about how the museum impacts the community.
Catherine Wilson Horne: EdVenture made a commitment to health education when we opened in 2003.
And then by the mid-aughts, we were engaged in planning, educational activities and family
opportunities around the topic of health.
And so we wanted to do something that was meaningful and relevant to our community.
And we found that the public didn’t understand the connection between their physical activity,
the nutrition that they put on their table everyday and overall health education in terms
of science and the human body.
Well we’ve just recently opened a brand new exhibit known as body detectives.
And body detectives brings the science of the human body and particularly the prevention
of chronic disease into a really realistic and engaging way to understand DNA, to explore
how medicines get created, how we balance surgery versus preventative health and it’s
a whole lot of fun.
Mary Aitchison: My son Noah has always loved his days at EdVenture, starting when he was
a toddler and would come into my backyard just fully engage and explore all the activities.
I think they just always had such lure.
It continues to, even as an eight year old now he walks in and then he is you know, just
fully engaged.
Noah Charles Aitchison Adams: If you look straight you know, you can see that big Eddie
guy, he is this 50 foot high monster.
Well I think its supposed to be like a real person and you can climb up his backbone,
it takes you, if you keep on going it will take you to the head which is the brain, except
the skull is taken out and if you look up you can see the brain and the inside of the
eyeballs which is kind of creepy.
There will be like exits anywhere around the back and then there are some tubes where you
can crawl to the bottom which is about his digestive system area and then there is one
that goes about from the stomach down to the digestive system there is a tube that you
can crawl down in to.
Catherine Wilson Horne: Eddie is the signature exhibit of EdVenture, and he truly is the
first thing you see when you walk in the door.
On the back side of Eddie and inside of Eddie there are four floors of organs which do start
at the top with the brain and go all the way down through the heart, the stomach, the intestines
and there is a 30 foot spinal column that you do climb up or down.
And he is a signature exhibit of the museum and he is certainly the star of the show when
it comes to health education at EdVenture. �