Turning a School Gym Into a Pop-Up Museum: A Collaborative School Science Assembly
Picture this.
A curtain runs down the middle of a school gymnasium. On one side, the lights are low. There’s the flicker of an LED campfire. Bones and fossils are arranged on tables like artifacts next to a hunting camp. A man named Sean Sullivan, The Mammoth Hunter, is telling kids about a world that existed 12,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths roamed North America and humans hunted them with spears.
On the other side of that curtain, the gym goes dark. Water ripples move across the ceiling and walls. And something very large is filling the room. Her name is Clara. She’s 56 feet long. She’s a gray whale. And in about two minutes, she’s going to be completely alive in the minds of every kid in that gymnasium.
Sean and I didn’t meet in a school gym. We met in a museum.
The first time Sean the Mammoth Hunter and I worked together I was standing next to the mammoth when I met Sean for the first time Once Sean the Mammoth Hunter began helping, our mammoth display became next level
Years ago, I ran a nonprofit called Colossal Fossils in Wausau, Wisconsin. One day, a woman named Carol brought her boyfriend in during one of my tours. I was standing next to a replica skull of the Hebior Mammoth, one of the most complete woolly mammoth specimens ever found in North America, talking about how early humans hunted these animals using a primitive but lethal weapon called the atlatl.
After the tour, Carol’s boyfriend approached me. He introduced himself as Sean. And then, very politely, he explained that I had been describing the atlatl wrong.
He was right. It was one of the best learning moments I’ve ever had, and the start of a friendship that’s been going ever since. Sean ended up helping at Colossal Fossils for a few years, bringing his own expertise and energy to everything we did. Then Covid hit. The museum closed. Sean went off on his own as The Mammoth Hunter, and I eventually got a 56-foot inflatable whale and started driving her to schools.
Different paths. Same mission.
Now we’re bringing it back together, and this time, we’re taking it on the road.
This is what Sean and I have been building together. An experience designed for schools. Two programs, one gym, one day. Half the school visits the Ice Age. The other half goes underwater. Then they switch. It's the ultimate school assembly pop-up science museum.
No two schools will look exactly the same. Some gyms are dark and cavernous, perfect for the full immersive effect. Water ripples on the ceiling, lights off inside Clara, the feeling of actually being 300 feet below the surface. Others have windows on every wall and light pours in all morning. That’s fine too. Clara is just as astonishing in full light. We customize it for each school. That’s the whole point.
I’ll admit, I’ve been dreaming about what the inside of Clara could look like someday. She has metal rings along her ceiling (if that's what you call it?). String battery-operated lights from those rings, and you’ve got bioluminescence. The deep ocean at night. It’s not something we’re doing yet, but it’s the kind of idea that keeps me up in a good way.
What I love most about this collaboration is what it says to kids without ever saying it out loud: the world is full of things worth being curious about. A mammoth. A whale. Both gone from this earth in ways that should give us pause. Both so large and so strange that standing next to them, or inside one, changes something in you.
Sean the Mammoth Hunter showing off whale bones and Ice Age tools A large crowd visits Clara the whale in Onalaska Whale bones on display at a school in South Central Wisconsin
Sean brings the Ice Age. I bring the ocean. Between the two of us, we cover about 50 million years of natural history in a single school day.
That’s not a bad field trip.
If you’re a principal or a teacher reading this and your mind is already running, reach out. We’re booking now and we’d love to build something with you.
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