Preview of Science Museum


A few years ago, the Superintendent of the Kings Park Schools (Suffolk County, New York) and the Kings Park School Board offered the friends of LIMSAT the use of two classrooms (about 1,500 sq.ft.), at the R.J. Osgood Administration Center Complex, for a start-up, or preview version, of the Long Island Museum of Science and Technology. This facility will act as an annex to the main museum in Nassau County. LIMSAT-Kings Park will also serve as an exhibit development and test center, a training center for local students wishing to learn how to be volunteer "explainers" to museum visitors, and as a super resource to area school science and technology programs. We plan to have communication links between both facilities.
From our start during the fall and winter of 1996, we've done most of the work ourselves. We sought skilled volunteers to help with the physical design (floor plans) and with the selection and design of the first hands-on technology exhibits (which also had to be scaled to fit in the available space). We used some of our limited funds to have new electric wiring and sheetrock walls installed professionally. Then a small group of volunteers began working on exhibit ideas, based on the information gathered earlier by the Exhibits Task Force, and representing, in some way, the existing technology companies of Long Island. We wanted to develop a number of exciting designs from which to select the first exhibits.	These pictures are a reminder of how we started to change bare rooms into a museum.
During the summer of 1997, volunteers worked to finish the rooms with fresh coats of paint. This was not the continuous activity we have come to expect from hired hands! Although some of the volunteers were middle school and high school students, the rest of us had professional and family obligations which limited time spent at the museum. Despite other obligations, we had painting parties at least one evening a week. We painted walls. We painted molding. We painted the ceiling girders. We used rollers with both long and short handles and we used paint brushes. Then we used rags to apply stain to doors. Carpeting was installed in both rooms during the following winter. We also had a new dropped ceiling and recessed lights installed in one of the rooms. Coordinating and scheduling these activities between school activities, holidays, and individual obligations remains an interesting task. Once the renovations and new room construction activities were completed, we met with those people who had volunteered after reading about us at this site, or in the papers. Some of these people provide valuable assistance in our operating environment. Others received work assignments related to locating reasonably priced commercial exhibits which fit our needs. A third group continues to work on the identification, design and construction of custom exhibits to meet our requirements. This activity is ongoing and we now have several small exhibits constructed. Preview LIMSAT has been the site of many of our finest accomplishments. Thousands of students and residents came to the preview LIMSAT to "try-out" our first exhibits and tell us of their reactions and suggestions. Entrance to former LIMSAT preview site. Kings Park LIMSAT was funded partly through the support of Vytra Health Plans, an early corporate sponsor.