New App Helps Burpee to Share Wonders

New App Helps Burpee to Share Wonders

By Sara Graves

Anne Weerda wants you to love the natural world. “You can’t ask someone to love something, or to save something, if they haven’t developed a relationship with it,” says Weerda, who is the executive director of Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford.

The museum has always invited people through its doors to explore, but now it also has a way of taking its wonders to the community ouside its doors, through a new augmented reality app, the only application of its kind.

Developed by Trekk, a local techdriven creative service agency that donated 100 percent of the time it spent creating the app, this technology currently has three major components used inside and outside of the museum building.

An in-house feature includes informative videos that play when certain items in the museum are scanned. Another allows for a massive 3-D animated image – such as a dinosaur – to pop up in the room.

“It’s like the ultimate pop-up book,” says Weerda.

An augmented reality feature can be used anywhere. Place a North American Beaver skull on the floor of a classroom – through the app, of course – then enlarge it and allow students to virtually walk inside the skull to look at it from all angles. There are currently nine objects that can be viewed in this way, including several dinosaur bones and some items from the museum’s Native American collection.

Weerda plans to continue bolstering what’s available in Burpee’s app, using more items from the museum’s collection that teachers can showcase in their

classrooms. Currently, this emergent technology is only available on Apple’s iOS operating system, but Weerda hopes a majority of the features will be available for Android users by spring.

Also available on the app is Burpee- Cast Kids, a podcast in which kids ask questions by recording them via voice memo on any smartphone and emailing them to the museum. A scientist at Burpee might answer them on the next episode.

The podcast has covered topics like entomology and dinosaur fossils, creating a dialogue between children and scientists. Hosted by Weerda, upcoming episodes will cover Native American history and geology, all aimed at listeners age 5-15.

Weerda notes that listeners of all ages find the podcast entertaining, and parents who listen with their children have enjoyed it as well.

Long-term, Weerda envisions virtual dig sites popping up in school gymnasiums across the globe.

“Kids can walk around and interact with the different specimens,” Weerda says. “They can tap on a virtual paleontologist’s shoulder and ask them a question… and they can experience it at their own pace.”

Bringing the Burpee lab into a school, Weerda imagines the app might inspire a whole new way of teaching.

“It kind of blows the doors off of this concept that the museum has four walls,” Weerda says. “I think that we need to think about the museum as a much larger entity. We can work with kids not just on

the one day they come on a field trip, but on every day that they’re learning about anything related to natural history.”

Weerda has been working hard to make Burpee Museum that resource.

She personally collects monarch larvae and gives them to families who are interested in raising the caterpillars, allowing people the opportunity to experience the metamorphosis into butterfly firsthand.

“This is how you teach kids to love their world,” she says, “by having these super-cool experiences at home.”

Whether it’s at home, on a dig site, in the classroom, or at the museum, the team at Burpee is committed to making learning fun. Getting youngsters involved and excited about the world around us encourages these little learners to grow and evolve.

“At Burpee, we are trying to blow the doors open with creativity,” says Weerda. “There is so much that can be done here, and we’re just scratching the surface.” ❚