Diversi-Tree
The Diversi-Tree is a central visual element in the Interactive Exhibit Gallery. As a climbing and play structure, it includes a tree house, slide, and a food pyramid game with large fruits and vegetables for kids to climb. As an interactive game, it employs two game show consoles that encourage visitors to compete in a fast-paced Ag trivia game. As questions are answered, the corresponding element on the tree lights up.
Milk Tank Theater
In the Milk Tank Theater, kids climb inside an actual milk tank to watch an animated film that describes how dairies get milk from the cow to their local supermarket while working to keep the cows and the land healthy and happy.
Mighty Mouth Exhibit
You are what you eat in the Mighty Mouth. In this electronic game visitors will be challenged to keep a video character healthy by feeding him a balanced diet. The characters become fat, skinny, healthy or sick before your eyes based on the food choices you make.
CattleLogged Exhibit
Where’s the beef? It’s right there in front of you – all of its 117 parts. This life-size steer has each of its parts labeled or CattleLogged to reflect the multitude of products that originate from cattle we use in our daily lives.
The Poultry Eggshibition
The Poultry exhibit will follow the same edgy and fun attitude, style, and philosophy represented in the Ag Science Center itself. It will be comprised of three stylized zones that tell the story of Poultry as a food – nutrition (Ag & Me), as an industry (Ag & Technology), and as a unique and historically important animal, biologically speaking (Ag & Nature).
Zone 1: “Bird” – A fancy restaurant kitchen….
Visitors follow their nose. The smell of mouth-watering roasting chicken leads them through two swinging kitchen doors into…a kitchen. This fancy, stylized “state of the art” kitchen is “back stage”, as it were, of a five-star, hoity-toity fictitious restaurant called Bird. The working part of the kitchen consists of 3 large plasma screens upon which the frenetic kitchen staff is preparing a variety of poultry meals. Bird’s owners and proprietors are our chef characters; young, hip; he is a Jamie Oliver-type and she is a Rachael Ray-type. Our Chefs are passionate about cooking their specialty: poultry and egg dishes from around the world. From their looks, they could be one of our younger visitor’s older brothers or sisters. In a funny, high-energy presentation that is a cross between the theatrical chaos of a kitchen preparing meals for a ravenous (unseen but noisy and demanding) crowd and the Iron Chef TV program, the Chefs expound on the virtues of poultry and egg dishes, all the while showing us how to prepare luscious looking (and smelling), healthy poultry and egg dishes.
The Message: Poultry and eggs are a tasty, healthy, very popular and extremely versatile food source, high in nutrition and low in fat. Poultry is consumed in great quantities all over the world and in every imaginable type of dish.
Zone 2: The Chicken and The Egg is an engaging, interactive Sim-type game in which Visitors are responsible for an egg farm. Visitors control production all the way from farm to supermarket. The hand’s-on game demonstrates the “cool factor” — the amazing technology and human attention — that’s required for the care, feeding and maintenance of large-scale egg production: growing, hatching, breeding, and processing.
The Message: Poultry health and welfare is one of the most important aspects of successful poultry farming; happy chickens lay more eggs, and healthy poultry and poultry environments leads to lower bird mortality and more birds to market. It makes good economic sense to treat poultry well.
Zone 3: Dig Them Birds
in this exhibit Visitors will be pleasantly surprised if not shocked to learn that, according to the latest science, poultry (okay, birds) are the closest relatives of dinosaurs on the planet.
Dig Them Birds is a themed faux archeological “dig” environment. Various fossils and displays tell the story of the bird/dino connection. Visitors learn how various poultry species (chickens, turkeys, ducks, pheasant, squab, etc.) have evolved physically through millions of years. Here the unique biology of these interesting animals (air sacs instead of lungs, the gizzard, etc.) is observed.
Going forward in time the exhibit traces poultry progress from the dinosaur through the history of domestication right up to present time, highlighting the history of game birds and poultry as they evolved as sources of food.
The Message: Birds and poultry have a fascinating history throughout the ages,
both in terms of their evolutionary development and as a food source.
Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs Exhibit
Who helps make and sell wine and other grape products? Sure – the farmer and the grocer, but how about chemists and graphic artists, glassmakers and writers, printers and bookkeepers, shippers and mechanics, physicists and data processors and many other specialists. This game gives visitors the chance to learn about the dozens of career opportunities available in viticulture, enology and agriculture.
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Rumen with a View Exhibit
How does a cow process its food to produce milk? In Rumen with a View a full-sized replica of a cow stares amazingly at a three-dimensional picture of its own four stomachs that seem to be revealed by an x-ray machine showing that the cow truly is the ultimate recycler.
Time Tractor Exhibit
On board the Time Tractor, visitors will see a satellite image of agriculture as it appears from high Earth orbit. As they turn the steering wheel, they go back in time to see the land before the affects of modern irrigation. Turned the other way, they will watch a sequence that illustrates the development of the land from the construction of the irrigation districts to present day and into the future getting a look at how land use choices impact our food supply and the environment
Water Pin-Ball Game
A team of kids gather around the Water Pin-Ball Game to compete for water. As water balls are collected, the level of water in the tank above drops. With a limited amount of water available, kids realize that they need to help each other distribute the water evenly in order to lengthen the game experience – and WIN!
Food Pyramid Play Area
In a self-contained Food Pyramid Play Area, younger children can be educated as well as entertained by building their very own food-group pyramid out of one-foot-square soft, rubber blocks. Other components include large sculpted fruits and vegetables for the kids to climb on and in.
Giant Pollinating Bee Exhibit
Hovering over the Diversi-Tree is a giant pollinating bee with wings flapping. This hanging, three-dimensional gift of nature makes many of our foods and flowers possible through pollination.
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