Tonganoxie Middle School winning exhibit from 2019-20 wins national design award
Tonganoxie students celebrate the opening of the Step Right Up! exhibit at Science City that they inspired. The opening took place in 2021. The group was named Battle of the Brains winner in December 2019 at Union Station, home to Science City, where the ongoing exhibit can be found. The students were Tonganoxie Middle School sixth- and seventh-graders during the 2019-20 school year when the winning proposal was announced at Union Station.
Step Right Up!, the Battle of the Brains winning exhibit inspired by Tonganoxie Middle School students in 2019, recently won the Merit Award in the Exhibit Design category at the Society of Experimental Graphic Design Global Design Awards.
The Burns & McDonnell exhibit at Union Station’s Science City in Kansas City, Mo., opened in March 2021.
TMS students were selected as the winning proposal in the 2019 Battle of the Brains competition among middle and high school teams in the KC metro area.
“Empowering young students to become co-designers results in a cheerful, magical exhibit to entertain all ages,” commented one juror who was part of the awards panel. “We appreciate the seamless integration of educational objectives and exhibition design, using gamification to inspire curiosity and learning.”
Another juror had similar sentiments.
“We loved that this project was co-created by students and designers, from the result of a national challenge to kids to design a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) exhibit,” the second juror said. “The exhibit looks so much like a fun carnival, that it is easy to overlook its true purpose — to empower kids to use STEAM principles to understand how amusement park games are rigged, and methods to level the playing field. Nowhere else did we see play so effectively combined with learning.”
The design team for Step Right Up! was Tonganoxie Middle School students at the time Jameson Breitzman, Lucy Graveman, Ella Pruitt, Wesley Johnson, Caleb Hodges, and Joshua Duvall, as well as TMS teacher Tracy Waldeier and paraprofessional Steve Bartlow.
Also on the Step Right Up! Science City exhibit design team were Julee Koncak (community relations director), Joel Jacobsen (architectural director), Charlotte Lewin (senior community relations strategist), Chelsea Wilson (marketing & public relations business partner), Zack Cole (senior architect), Sophie Lapping (senior architect/project manager), Andrew Healey (assistant construction manager), Keith Teagarden (construction superintendent), Brandon Guffey (senior graphic designer), Shannon Farr (experiential graphic designer), Erich Noack (writer/editor) and Melanie Luttig (market research analyst).
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- Tonganoxie students celebrate the opening of the Step Right Up! exhibit at Science City that they inspired. The opening took place in 2021. The group was named Battle of the Brains winner in December 2019 at Union Station, home to Science City, where the ongoing exhibit can be found. The students were Tonganoxie Middle School sixth- and seventh-graders during the 2019-20 school year when the winning proposal was announced at Union Station.