Former Lakers design GRCM exhibit
GVL / Eric Coulter Grand Valley Student Alyssa Beck demonstrates the bubble device that was designed by GVSU engineering students.
Oct 3, 2011
Children who visit the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum will have the chance to play with a whole tower of bubbles during their visit.
The GRCM is now home to a life-sized bubble tower designed and constructed by two former Grand Valley State University engineering students. Users of the bubble tower stand in the middle of the educational toy and pull a rope that raises a human-sized bubble around the user.
The GRCM had a 10-year-old bubble tower in use before the new tower was constructed. It was finished in August.
Jan Stone, exhibit and community relations manager for the GRCM, asked the School of Engineering last year to find students interested in taking on the project of designing a new tower for the museum.
“We have more than 150,000 visitors each year and most of them use the bubble tower, so it was time to find a new one,” Stone said. “A lot of engineering calculations go into making these devices so I contacted Grand Valley.”
Besides the fact that the old bubble tower was 10 years old and a popular exhibit at the GRCM, one additional reason for wanting a new bubble tower constructed was to make the tower wheelchair-accessible.
“This could very well be the first bubble tower in the nation that is wheelchair accessible; I’ve never seen one before,” Stone said. “The students had so much knowledge of materials we didn’t know existed. They knew what they were doing.”
In January of last year, engineering professor Wael Mokhtar was approached by Stone with the project request. Mokhtar assigned the project to former GVSU students Michael Ritsema and Matt Van Slooten.
Mokhtar said the key to the project was understanding how to communicate with Stone and others from the museum in layman terms then receiving feedback and translating that feedback back into technical terms. Mokhtar said this was a challenge for Ritsema and Slooten.
“That’s what it is like in the working world,” Mokhtar said. “So it was a great opportunity to experience what it’s like to work with a client.”
Ritsema and Van Slooten did not immediately return requests for comment. All comments from Stone and Mokhtar are from a GVNow article on Sep. 26.
