Fly Science - exhibition

Student - Tyara Jansz

supervisor - Dr Darren Williams

My project is a museum exhibit consisting of three connecting rooms which teaches the public about fly neurodevelopment science, from why people are interested in it, to the processes they use to investigate it, to the findings they have uncovered. The exhibit will be hosted at the Science Museum, and so the audience is anyone who would visit the Museum (i.e., the general public/families). Visitors enter the exhibit through a giant model of a fly’s face, into a room with projections of microscope images of fly brain cells – as if they are physically entering the fly’s brain – where they will learn some background about how fly nervous systems develop and why people are interested. Then, they will get to ‘join the lab’ themselves and partake in games and tasks mimicking how scientists breed, dissect, and stain fly brains and spinal cords before looking at them under a microscope to learn about some real experiments and investigations going on in the lab, and what these have taught us about neurodevelopment, as well as what scientists are still yet to discover.