The Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck 
Beading Activity with the Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck 
Basket Making Activity with the Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck 
Drum Making Activity with the Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck 
Air Quality Sonification Exhibit 
Wildfire Ready Exhibit 
Crystal Corner Exhibit 
Making and Tinkering in the Bitterroot Teacher Workshop 
Rainbow Light Box Exhibit 
Painting With Bugs Activity 
The Bitterroot Maker Fair 
Pixel Pegs Exhibit 
Rainbow Light Box Exhibit Prototype 
Rainbow Light Box Exhibit Prototype 
The Summer of Science 
Chocolate Welding Science Kit Booklet 
Rubber Band Car Science Kit 
Night Light Circuit Science Kit 
Painting with Chemistry Science Kit
The Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck
The Kwul ‘I’tkin Maker Truck was an NSF-funded collaboration between the University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area, the SciNation on the Flathead Reservation Advisory Group, and partners at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
My primary role in this project as spectrUM’s Making and Tinkering Program Manager was to work with all collaborators to design and deploy a mobile makerspace that integrated traditional ways of making with rapid prototyping technologies such as 3D printing and laser engraving. I led a design workshop to determine the layout of the vehicle’s interior that encouraged visitor interaction, and worked closely with a local fabricator to outfit the interior with a rechargeable battery system that powered all necessary equipment.
The SciNation advisory group identified three primary activities to focus on – drum making, beading and basket making. I worked with traditional artists and makers at the People’s Center (now the Three Chiefs Cultural Center) to ensure that the final educational activity shared the story of how these items are traditionally made by native Montana tribes.
As a capstone to this project, I worked with our team to create and share a curriculum booklet that outlined how to recreate these activities in other settings. In addition, I was co-author on an article about our collaborative process that was published in Connected Science Learning.
Making Across Montana
I worked in my capacity as the Associate Director of spectrUM to create a mobile exhibition for their Science on Wheels program, which I oversaw from 2020-2025. This exhibition was funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Deliverables included a traveling exhibition – Montana Makers – that incorporated making and tinkering activities relevant to Montana communities, a 2-hour teacher professional development workshop for teachers at each of the school sites visited by the exhibition, and a Peer Learning Community of teachers across the western Montana region to share best practices around STEAM education. These professional development workshops served an estimated 250 teachers.
I served as the program manager for the project for the first 3 years, eventually taking over as the principal investigator on the project to ensure all deliverables were implemented before the project concluded. As with other spectrUM projects, design and development of the exhibition was a collaborative process that included input from the SciNation advisory group and the Bitterroot STEAM Advisory Group to ensure that activities, role models, and exhibit components were culturally relevant to the sites that the program would serve. Overall, the exhibition visited 10 different schools across the state, serving an estimated 8,000 participants.
ResilienceMT
This NOAA-funded project was a collaboration between the spectrUM Discovery Area, UM’s Environmental Studies Department, and a statewide cohort of additional partners and communities.
In my capacity as spectrUM’s Associate Director, I worked alongside project partners to design, develop and build a traveling science exhibition to share stories from Montana communities around resilience to climate change.
I led the project team in a Big Idea workshop to refine our design process, from which we settled on: Montana communities share stories of resilience and continue to build their toolboxes as they adapt to a changing climate.
Exhibit components built out from the Big Idea to share how communities are responding to wildfires and smoke, extreme heat, flooding, and drought. The exhibition traveled around the state, and was the primary installation in spectrUM’s museum during the winter of 2024.
The ResilienceMT project also included a storytelling event, community forums, a digital repository of climate resilience stories, and so much more!
Exhibit Case Study: Cubic Meter Smoke Box
For spectrUM’s ResilienceMT exhibition, I was tasked with sharing how folks can improve their resilience towards wildfires during the smoky Montana summers. A local organization – Climate Smart Missoula – developed plans for people to create their own DIY air filters out of a furnace filter and box fan to reduce indoor air pollutants.
To share this concept as an exhibit took extensive testing and prototyping – how do you create a “fire” in a box that has to travel across the state into school gyms?
This exhibit started out as a yard stick frame with 3D printed brackets and saran wrap to test the overall concept. I then worked with a local fabricator to create a metal enclosure on wheels that would encase the entire exhibit. Why a cubic meter? Well, during one of our project workshops, a local collaborating scientist shared that PM 2.5 concentration is calculated as the particle concentration in micrograms in a cubic meter of air.
Through a lot of brute force electronics and coding iterations, I was able to hack an off-the-shelf smoke machine with an Arduino microprocessor to trigger poor air quality inside of a clear, sealed box for a set duration. The fan assembly inside clears out the fake smoke (it’s actually just water and glycerin!) over time, and a Wynd indoor air quality sensor displays the current air quality inside the box for the user.
By making both the sensor and fan assembly components out of inexpensive commercially available items, it was easy to share with visitors through interpretation and signage how they could use these very same things to improve or monitor their home’s indoor air quality.
Exhibit Case Study: Rainbow Light Box
I will often see an interesting phenomenon or exhibit and think, “That would make an amazing museum exhibit!” The rainbow light box is just one such piece.
Make: Magazine highlighted a Japanese artist discovered that when mylar sheeting is rolled into tubes and sandwiched between two translucent sheets, it creates an amazing pixellation effect in the shadows. If you add an RGB light, the effect becomes even more mesmerizing as you add in color addition combinations.
I first approached this exhibit as a modular piece that kids could contribute to, but the concept wasn’t very workable and the pandemic nixed that implementation. In the end, I worked with a local fabricator to create an angled 3 foot square shadow projection box that allows users to create a mini light/puppet show for their friends and family members. I collaborated with connections in the University of Montana Physics and Astronomy Department to develop signage that accurately portrays the optical physics involved in this phenomenon.
This exhibit remains one of my all-time favorite integrations of art and science! Instructions on how to make your own are available on Instructables, and this piece is one that is also one that I can easily recreate for other museums.
Making and Tinkering in the Bitterroot
From 2016-2020 I worked alongside spectrUM’s Bitterroot STEAM Advisory Group to design and implement educational activities related to making and tinkering and STEAM in schools across the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula. I had the great fortune to hold the title of Making and Tinkering Programs Manager at spectrUM for several years while I managed this project and others that integrated making-related activities into the museum.
I created a suite of activities that I tested with a cohort of teachers each year at our Making and Tinkering Institute, a 2-day workshop devoted to best practices in implementation of STEAM curriculum. I then implemented these activities alongside the teachers in their 5th grade classrooms at two different schools, traveling to the schools for a full day each week to work with students and teachers directly to facilitate these activities. Each year’s programming culminated in a Bitterroot Maker Fair, held at the Bitterroot College, where students and families gathered to enjoy some of the activities we did together in their schools.
All told, I worked with over 50 amazing teachers and over 2,000 creative students through this 4-year program, which was funded by the Martin Family Foundation.
I’m very proud of the work I did on this project, especially the Making and Tinkering Cookbook – a curriculum guide that I have distributed to hundreds of teachers across the country. In addition to the Cookbook, I wrote and published dozens of Instructables to share the curriculum with a wider audience in the maker community, and have received several awards and accolades through the Instructables platform. The activities and resources I helped to provide to the schools through this program are still in use today!
Problem Solvers 1.0 & 2.0
I had the great fortune to implement several projects during my time at spectrUM that implemented funding from the Jane S. Heman Foundation. From 2019-2025 I oversaw two complementary programs that involved the collaborative creation of curriculum, exhibits and activities to share with communities in the Bitterroot Valley and Mineral County.
Each summer, I worked with partner organizations such as libraries and historical museums to deliver high-quality educational programming for free to small, rural communities. This involved everything from coming up with the activities, training educators on best practices and delivery of the curriculum, and working with the Bitterroot STEAM Advisory Group to implement feedback around how to leverage this program for workforce development.
In addition to the Summer of Science, I developed exhibits and outreach activities to deliver to schools through spectrUM’s Science on Wheels program. This program visited schools up and down the Bitterroot Valley and in Mineral County with an in-school field trip hosted in their gym or common area. We featured exhibit pieces that centered creative problem-solving and collaboration, and each visit culminated in a Family Science Night where students brought their families to share about what they had learned during the visit.
Exhibit Case Study: Air Quality Sonification
Every innovation starts with a question. In this case, it was, “If you could “hear” air quality, what would it sound like?”. The seed of this exhibit was planted during a NISE Network Earth and Space Professional Learning Community workshop I participated in with about 100 other museums. My project involved finding a way to present earth and space data in such a way that it was appealing and engaging to a wide audience.
My initial prototype involved running Missoula air quality data through an online tool called TwoTone that turns any excel file into music. I then hooked up a Makey Makey circuit kit to a piece of cardboard with a Mario themed warp pipe scene, mostly because the initial music sounded like the 2nd level of the original game. When you touched any of the buttons, a short song would play so you could hear that season’s air quality data.
As part of spectrUM’s ResilienceMT exhibition, I was able to take this prototype concept into full production as an exhibit. I “sonified” publicly available wildfire smoke data from the Environmental Protection Agency for the 2017 wildfire season – a particularly bad year for wildfires in Montana – from several communities around the state, with a special focus on those partner communities that were involved in the project.
Because each community’s wildfire data is unique to its location, every button on the exhibit plays a different 30-second song for the summer, with some communities being obviously more hard-hit by smoke and wildfire impacts than others.
spectrUM Science Kits
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a particular challenge for public-serving institutions like museums and libraries. How could we continue to serve our audience while our physical locations were closed during lockdowns?
I leveraged existing grant funds for educational programs from 2020-2022 to design and distribute over 23,000 science kits to schools, museums, and libraries across Montana. Each kit was packaged with all of the materials necessary to create a memorable experience at home. A physical instruction booklet with clear photos and detailed instructions accompanied each kit, with online extensions published on Instructables to incorporate video and other digital media. Each of the kits is available for download for free from spectrUM’s website.
Content included everything from welding with chocolate, creating rockets out of bouncy balls and straws to creating a small-scale tensegrity table.
These science kits allowed our museum to remain connected with the students, teachers, and families that were stuck at home with school closures. We worked with teachers to integrate these kits into their online classroom curriculum, scheduling visits from content-relevant role models. One example is Laura Newby, an artisan welder in Stevensville, MT who served as a special guest for our Chocolate Welding kit to several virtual classroom visits and created a video to share about her profession, which she described as, “sewing with fire.”
Our organization received an Infosys USA Infy Makers Award for $10,000 to distribute 3,000 of these kits in 2021.
