By Rachel Coussens

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum’s Discovery Ambassadors program gives kids the opportunity to learn about engineering as a career.

Visit the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, located in McMinnville, on a Saturday afternoon and you will find a handful of middle schoolers and high schoolers. Located in McMinnville, Evergreen appears to more of a resort than a museum. Three airplane-high buildings house an IMAX® theater, space museum, and airplane museum. Within each building 12 to 18-year-olds can be found dressed in slacks and eager to talk to sightseers about anything from Howard Hughes’ famous Spruce Goose to an F-4 fighter plane.

These kids are members of the museum’s Discovery Ambassadors program–youth that volunteer in the museum. They spend their time on the floor talking to visitors about planes or history that they find interesting. They research information on their own by looking at reader boards or talking to docents, many of whom are history-rich war veterans. Additional volunteer activities include passing out 3D glasses in the IMAX® theater and managing Discovery Carts that contain materials to educate visitors on concepts such as wind tunnels.

McMinnville High School Sophomore Anthony Heatherly, 15, was one of the museum’s first Discovery Ambassadors. “I volunteer here about biweekly on Saturdays,” he says. “During the school year if I have a lot of homework, the staff here is very understanding that school is something more important than being here.”

Fellow Discovery Ambassador Nic McDaniel, 13, takes part in an abundance of afterschool sporting activities including year-round swimming, but still finds time for Evergreen’s program. “It doesn’t take up that much time even if you do a lot of sports and have homework,” McDaniel says. “You only need to come in two weekends–four hours each one–and then they usually have monthly meetings.”

The museum offers their Discovery Ambassadors free lunches at the café, free IMAX® tickets, behind the scenes museum access, and admission to special Education Department events. While Heatherly enjoys these benefits, he believes students should volunteer for other reasons. “There are some people here that are here for the incentives and that’s not what volunteering is about,” Heatherly says. “Come out here because you find it interesting.”

In addition to all of the museum’s volunteer perks, participants have the opportunity to build their résumé with their experiences in the program. Students improve their knowledge of science, aviation, technology, and space, while working on their public speaking and customer service skills. Establishing and practicing these life skills often gives members the side effect of confidence. “Just recently, I’ve started really doing a lot of presentations and I’ve gotten pretty good at it,” Heatherly says.

Participants work with Larry Wood, Director of Education and volunteer docent, as he coaches the ambassadors on all things space, engineering, plane related, and fun. “Kids like airplanes, airplanes are cool. When somebody tells you why this airplane does what it does, that’s even cooler,” he says. Wood comes from a background of 30 years in the Marine Corps as a pilot and nine years of teaching middle school. “This is an opportunity for kids to know what it is to be an engineer,” he says. “When I talk to kids I say, ‘You know if you really want to make this a better place, you’ve got to get into this stuff, engineering and science, because this is how we are going to fix the things that are wrong in this world.’”

Discovery Ambassadors hosts only a fraction of what the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum does to help educate kids about science and engineering. The museum partners with McMinnville High School to offer The Engineering & Aerospace Science Academy (EASA) at onsite classrooms in the museum’s space museum building. Heatherly is a participant of this program. “I have physics over there, an intro to engineering class, and a projects class,” he says. “There’s math over there that’s more centered around the geometry instead of the more theoretical type mass so it applies more to what you will be doing when you grow up.”

Evergreen’s education caters to an array of ages and youth programs. The Aerospace Book Club is a collaborative effort between the McMinnville Public Library teams and the museum to provide readings for children in grades kindergarten to 3rd grade. The museum also hosts programs for boy and girl scouts including access to group camping site. If a class or group cannot make it to the museum, Outreach Coordinator Matthew Van Dixon travels to public and private schools to give 45 minute to one hour presentations on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to kindergarten to 12th grade classes.

“We’ve seen studies that say if you can get a kid’s attention, one single item will inspire a child in their choice of profession. That’s what we are trying to do here with EASA, our education program, and the museum in general,” Wood says. “We want to show some kid something where he’s going to say, ‘I can do that. I can build that. I can fly that.’ If we can do that, then we’re going to get a kid that can do something that we’re short of in the United States.”

When asked what the kids would be doing on a Saturday afternoon instead of being at the museum, most replied that they would be at home playing videogames. Discovery Ambassador Jorge Estrade, 12, says, “I’d probably be outside right now doing nothing, just sitting around.” The program inspires kids to learn. Santiago Flores, 13, says, “I like reading science.” His words are made concrete when he is spotted ten minutes later with his nose stuck in an aviation history book.

“It’s definitely neat to be surrounded by planes and learn about the history and the ideas behind how everything has evolved,” Heatherly says. “The idea of you aren’t just walking around or in a boat or driving a car, you’re up in the air. Out of all of us, there really aren’t many of us that can really fly.”

Rachel Coussens works as a freelance writer. She is in her fourth year at the University of Oregon studying magazine journalism. www.rachelcoussens.com.

this article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Portland Family Magazine.