Bernie Zubrowski is the ultimate "hands on" science educator. He has given us a lot to think about. Better than that, he's given us a lot to play with. As you'll read in this article from the Boston Globe, his work with bubbles is known and appreciated world wide.
Likely, his best known contribution to the bubble community is the string and straw bubble frame. You've seen it before, two straws as handles with a loop of string running through them. This tool has given kids and adults many years of delight. It's also given many bubble entertainers an amazingly adaptable tool to use in their acts (see photo of Doug R. below). To listen to Bernie talk about his bubble frame invention, click here!
Connecting straws with paperclips to make geometric bubble tools, using household items as bubble blowers, finding a way to connect learning with fun... Bernie Z has inspired bubble explorers of all ages for many years and he definitely has earned his place in the pantheon of bubblers you must know.
Boston Globe
September 30, 1982
Cross Santa Claus with Einstein and you might get Bernie Zubrowski. With his casually groomed beard and gently humorous gaze, Zubrowski even looks the part.
Zubrowski is a developer of science materials at the Children's Museum, the inventor responsible for the museum's enormously popular "Bubble" exhibit and the new Raceways room, which, along with another new exhibit called "Mirrors," opened in July.
Like Santa or the scientist, Zubrowski usually stays behind the scenes, content in the knowledge that thousands of kids are enjoying his ideas. Tomorrow, however, he goes public. As part of Museum Goers Month, he will demonstrate his bubble techniques outdoors at Faneuil Hall Marketplace's South Market at 10:30 a.m. Kids and grown-ups will have the chance to create their own bubbles, just the way they do in the museum exhibit, dipping homespun equipment like orange juice cans, straws and strings into tables of suds to make bubbles of all shapes and sizes. (The record seems to be one little girl's 8-foot bubble.)
"We had a terrible problem with the soap in France," said Zubrowski during an interview in the Raceways room on a Monday when the museum was closed and eerily quiet. "We use Joy here; it really makes the best and longest-lasting bubbles. We tried 15 different French soaps; nothing worked. Now some French microbiologists have asked me to mail them a 32-ounce bottle of Joy for analysis, but the post office said it would cost $85 to send airmail so I'm looking for someone who is going to Paris and who can take it."
Bubbles are fun to make and to blow. But, pointing out that Einstein and Newton were avid bubble blowers, Zubrowski says, "There's a lot of math involved in bubbles: Soap film under tension in a frame shrinks to the smallest area. And soap froth behaves similarly to certain cells. All this is very complex, of course, and different ages respond to the exhibit on different levels. But watching the bubbles can sharpen anybody's powers of observation.
"I made a videotape of a girl playing with one part of the bubble exhibit for 45 minutes. I believe that when people get that involved one of the rewards is a sense of mastery over their environment."
Zubrowski also believes that improvising with commonplace materials can be an effective way both to learn and to have a good time. A chemistry major at Loyola College in Baltimore, he was a member of the Peace Corps in Bangladesh and in the late 1960s helped to develop science curriculums in Kenya. He began blowing bubbles in Africa, an activity he calls a combination of art and science.
"I decided that teaching in public school was too confining for me. I think there's too much sitting and listening and not enough doing in most classrooms. Kids' muscles have to get involved: Things like bubbles and golf balls are all very kinetic, very exciting."
In 1971, he found a hospitable environment for his creativity: The Children's Museum, where the 43-year-old Watertown resident has been ever since.
"My unofficial job description here is bricoleur,' which is a French word for an artist-scientist-handyman who improvises and invents . . . I usually start with a material or a phenomenon that interests me and I figure it will also interest other people. I know there's some sort of science there, and I want to get that across, too."
In the case of Raceways the phenomenon was the motion of something round on a track. The main components of the exhibit are golf balls and cheap plastic molding. But these humble materials have been put together to stimulate play and also to encourage discoveries about velocity, acceleration, the pattern of colliding balls.
Raceways has eight different stations, each of which has an activity and a message. Sending a ball down a spiral ramp, for instance, is fun to do and watch, but also teaches a lesson about acceleration - that the ball starts slowly and speeds up toward the bottom.
"There are college level experiments in physics in this room," says the inventor. "One thing that has been particularly gratifying is that adults get as involved in it as children do. Different ages respond at different levels. And men get more involved than they usually do: Maybe it's the association with golf balls that makes them feel that this kind of play is somehow OK."
In keeping with Zubrowski's educational philosophy visitors to Raceways get physically involved. The exhibit tests skills of coordination: Can you make the ball leap into the tin can at the end of a ramp?
The deceptively simple looking Raceways was four years in the making. "It took me three years just to develop a simple device to connect the tracks."
Once his basic ideas were formulated, he turned them over to the Museum's design and production staff where a team headed by Janet Kamien made sure the final exhibit could withstand the wear and tear of 500,000 little and not so little visitors a year.
For such a large-scale project, Raceways was impressively economical. "It probably cost about $2500 for materials," Kamien estimates, "and counting the staff time for experimenting and building, the whole thing probably cost a bit over $20,000. A major exhibit in a big science museum, on the other hand, can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"After any new exhibit is in place at the museum, there's a whole debugging process that goes on; we expect that about 25 percent of what we've come up with won't work out," she says. For example, the roller coaster in Raceways, where balls dip along a wave-like path, vibrated excessively. The solution was to anchor it to a plywood frame.
Perhaps the ultimate test of Raceways' appeal is that its creator has so much fun with it. "Let's do what the kids do," Zubrowski suggests. His imitation of a 10-year-old tough kid is devilishly accurate as he throw balls straight down a funnel where the balls are supposed to spiral in more leisurely fashion.
At the loop-the-loop station Zubrowski waxes poetic: "This shows the motion of a ball in a vertical circle, but it's also just plain beautiful." He cites the ball's swoop, its swishy sound, the elegant curves it forms.
"You know," he says with satisfaction, "There's really an esthetic to this."
To listen to Bernie talk about his bubble frame invention, click here!
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