Take a Pinch of Imagination, Add a Smidgen of Whimsy
CHARLOTTESVILLE RESIDENTS CREATE IMMEASURABLE FUN

	Here's an unusual recipe:  Take two students enrolled in a
"Museums and Education" course at the University of Virginia.  Add a
class project that calls for designing a museum exhibit.  Add the
talents, creativity and enthusiasm of two Charlottesville mothers.
The result is The Magical Measurement History Tour, a fun, factual
exhibit at The Virginia Discovery Museum. 

	Marie Beaurline and Razel Solow, who created the winning
recipe for learning, will lead a private tour of the interactive
exhibit on Wednesday, Dec. 3, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Virginia
Discovery Museum on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall.  Reporters are
invited.

	 Beaurline and Solow, who in 1994 were both graduate students
enrolled in the education course, found they shared an interest in
children's museums.  Anxious to create a children's exhibit that had
never been staged before, they proposed a measurement-through-history
display in which a central measuring concept from each era would be
presented.  They submitted a 60-page prospectus describing the exhibit
to the course leader, John B. Bunch, an associate professor in U.Va.'s
Curry School of Education.

	"What struck me about their proposal was the linking of
children's body dimensions and those of commonly experienced objects
to more abstract units of measurement," said Bunch, who awarded the
students A's.  (Beaurline has since graduated from Mary Baldwin
College.)

	Beaurline and Solow designed the exhibit for The Virginia
Discovery Museum, which hired Bil Bond, a Richmond-based artist, to
build the exhibit components.  With funding from Ronald McDonald's
Children's Charities, the exhibit opened in October and will remain at
the museum through Jan. 18.

	The exhibit explores the tools, units and reasons behind
measurement's evolution .  To enter the exhibit, people have to
measure themselves in oranges and decide which of three doorways
equals their "orange height."  "Measuring yourself in oranges is a
colorful, whimsical introduction to the topic," said Solow. "It
shows that units of measurement are arbitrary."

	A favorite among the stations in the exhibit is one showing
how precision became critical during the Industrial Revolution.  If
visitors properly align calibrations in cylinders at the station, a
bulb lights up.

	Other stations reveal how the human body can be used as a unit
of measurement, display how standardized measurement helps
cross-cultural trade, and shows how miniaturization has allowed new
measurement methods.  Visitors can also measure a sack of flour, a cup
of dirt, a teaspoon of sand and a pinch of grass seed.
	
	"Our goal is to have children see measuring and mathematics as
fun," said Solow.  The creators also wanted visitors to gain an
appreciation of how measurement started, how it developed and how
measuring concepts can differ.  

	A component of the exhibit that is important to Solow, who
expects to earn a Ph.D. in education from U.Va. in 1998, is that
people of all ages and abilities can learn from material presented in
a fun, interesting format.  A teacher at the Peabody School in
Charlottesville, Solow is founder of Guiding Gifted Children, a
resource group for parents of children in area public and private
schools.  

	For more information on the exhibit, contact: Marie Beaurline
at (804) 984-1993; Razel Solow at (804) 978-3103; or Peppy Linden,
director of the Virginia Discovery Museum, at (804) 977-1025.  John
Bunch can be reached at (804) 924-0834.

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                                                       Nov. 26, 1997

	For more information about what's happening at the
University of Virginia, visit U.Va.'s Top News website at
http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/.