Inflatable Heart

The Heart Arc provided the Amber and Indigo Bands (12 and 13 year olds) with ways to look at the topic through literal and metaphorical ways. During their Exploration projects, they took what they learned about the heart as an organ to reconstruct it through various media.

Indigo Band learned a great deal about Heart through exploring it as a biological organ by not just analyzing and dissecting a few (chicken and cow) with our Science Collaborator, but also by familiarizing themselves with its workings and structures to a level that they could then abstract them in the form of a drawing, then a model, then a three-dimensional life-size version.

After looking at the real structures of the heart in their dissection labs, they worked in groups around designing a one-way valve using cardboard and buttons to model how blood moves through the chambers of the heart. They asked questions like, What is a heart? What do we know? What do we want to know? They explored and noted external characteristics of chicken hearts, then dissected them with the aim of finding the inner chambers. The heart as a pump became more apparent, and finding the different chambers became a sort of scavenger hunt. The students showed great wonder that a small heart can power such a being as a chicken.

Next, they considered the circulatory system as a whole, using tubing, colored water, balloons and other materials to pump “blood” around a life-sized body. Students were presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they were biomedical engineers asked to design artificial heart valves. We went through the engineering and design process to address the challenge of creating a replacement valve for the heart, considering how the valves function, and how we might mimic that function with cardboard boxes. How can we get the "blood cells" (buttons) to pass from the atrium (one side of the box) to the ventricle (the other side of the box) without slipping back into the atrium?

As a final medium for exploring hearts, students dove into inflatables as a concept by creating inflatable cubes and designing a one-way “valve” doorway into their cubes. In considering the heart as a house, they wondered how they might redesign it in a way where no structures overlapped, then brought it to life in all three dimensions using fans and plastic sheeting. 

The Inflatable Heart Project tested the middle schoolers’ collaboration, construction, and performance skills while demonstrating their deep understanding of the biological process. By the end of the arc, the students succeeded in creating an experience that participants could enter and climb through that illustrated the concepts of how the heart works and how oxygen and CO2 are exchanged within the body. They staffed, scheduled, and manned the experience during Exposition night entirely independently of their collaborators.