The National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm is on tour with Sjukt Smart – Innovations in the fight against Corona.

The National Museum of Science and Technology is a science center in Stockholm and Sweden’s biggest museum of technology. In February they reopened to the public and kicked off their brand new traveling exhibition, Sjukt Smart – Innovations in the fight against Corona, including our own Corona Exhibition for Inside explorer.

“We have just opened up again after a long period of Corona lockdown and now receive visitors with great care. We have really been looking forward to meeting the visitors again and have prepared for the reopening with news to offer.”, says Magdalena Tafvelin Heldner, Curator at The National Museum of Science and Technology. 

Born out of the pandemic is Sjukt Smart – Innovations in the fight against Corona, a traveling exhibition open for visiting teachers and school classes in grades 3-9. The exhibition is shown within the museum’s mobile education program Maker Tour, in which the museum collaborates with schools, organizations, and venues in the suburbs of Stockholm to reach groups that usually don’t come to the museum.

Magdalena, curator, producer, and manager of the Sjukt Smart project, tells us that during the ongoing pandemic the museum interviewed people who had initiated or worked with various innovations in the search for a solution to the pandemic. These interviews form the basis of the Sjukt Smart exhibition, featuring initiatives from young and old, students, private individuals, researchers, and entrepreneurs. Students will learn about how innovations develop in a global crisis and become new inventions such as vaccines, thermal cameras, and face masks. 

The Corona exhibition as a portable touch table experience

The portable exhibition is made up of several interactive stations, and included as a prominent centerpiece, is the Corona exhibition on Inside Explorer. It’s installed on a touch table where students can explore the spread of the pandemic, see what happens to the lungs before, during, and after having Covid-19, and study the virus’s inner parts and structure. 

As part of the supplied educational material and guidelines, students are asked to answer questions such as: 
– How can you feel in the lungs that you have a severe covid infection?
– What are the red protruding proteins on the virus particle? 
– How does the virus affect your lungs if you get severe covid-19?
– What is corona? 

When introduced to the Corona Exhibition, Magdalena saw a perfect match. “We thought that it was just spot on to use this kind of scientific visualization techniques to tell the story of Corona, what happens in the body, how the virus spread across the globe, and we were especially fascinated with the story of a patient whose lungs show several stages of corona infection over time”, she says. 

She adds that The Corona Exhibition covers both a micro and a macro perspective, with visualizations stretching from a microscopic protein to the entire globe. The museum has been using Inside Explorer in another exhibition since 2012 and was well aware of its potential. “When we had a bunch of test pilots at the age of 10 before the exhibition opened, they dived directly onto the visualization table and intuitively understood how to use it.”

“We think it is a fun way to be able to show groundbreaking research from Sweden, but also how Swedish researchers collaborate with other countries to deliver scientific content, such as the corona exhibition. We look forward to future collaborations.”

And we do too.

Learn more about the Corona Exhibition and let us know if we can assist you in your outreach programs and covid-related initiatives.