Digital Detectives

Printing Dinosaurs For Summer Science

- Steve Murray

Give students the right scientific puzzle and they’ll think like scientists. That was the idea behind a summer camp for high school students at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Students had access to museum resources like computer graphics programs, 3D printers, and guidance from museum staff members. For two weeks the campers became digital detectives, assembling evidence and asking questions. In the process, they also took a close look at a possible future career.

A Paleo Puzzle

The program title was sure to excite campers: “Capturing Dinosaurs: Reconstructing Extinct Species Through Digital Fabrication.” In fact, it was an experiment. “Capturing Dinosaurs is the first time the museum has tried to use digital fabrication to teach young people about science. Specifically, about paleontology,” said Barry Joseph, associate director for digital learning at the museum.

Like real scientists, the students confronted a puzzle. “Part of the program was that we did not tell them the animal that they were scanning,” said Aki Watanabe, a student at the museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School and a camp assistant. “So part of the puzzle was looking at the bones that they were scanning and trying to figure out which dinosaur it came from.”

Museum staff taught the students about research methods and about all of the necessary equipment. Then, the student-scientists took up the challenges of modeling the fossils, making reproductions, and fitting them together to figure out the type of dinosaur they were working with. “Every time they tried to stitch the models together, they were looking with careful detail at minute aspects of those bones,” said Joseph. “The same things that paleontologists do.”