The MESS Hall is a busy place.

Many days, between field trips and regular visitors some 200 people come through the science museum on Tarragona Street. Teachers who want to book a field trip there for this May are almost out of luck. But they can get a good spot for next fall if they call now.

Until now, volunteers have been able to manage the workload, but founder Megan Pratt sees the writing on the wall.

“Basically as I was watching our field trips fill up I was like, ‘OK, we need a little more help,” she says.

MESS stands for Math, Engineering, Science and Stuff, and is the brainchild of Pratt, a Pensacola native and MIT graduate who founded the museum as an outgrowth of her desire to improve science enrichment opportunities for students in upper elementary and middle school grades.

As the MESS Hall has grown in popularity, Pratt is looking for a public programs coordinator to add consistency to the programming and to help invigorate the Hall with outreach and marketing ideas.

For the summer, Pratt says they will hire another assistant person who can help with just regular operations. There certainly is more than enough work to go around.

“One of our volunteers is like, ‘Wow, everyone that sweeps the floors here has a Ph.D,’” Pratt says.

We have been exceeding what we were anticipating with attendance and every Saturday someone comes in and says ‘I never knew you existed!’

“We end up with a lot of people who come when they are visiting their family. You know, grandma lives here, the kids live in Birmingham and they stop in. About 30 percent of our visitors are from out of town or there is someone in the group who is from out of town.”

The MESS Hall opened in its Tarragona location about a year ago. before that, they rented space for the summer on Romana Street behind the U.S. Post Office.

Last year, the MESS Hall received a $290,000 tourism promotion grant from BP that also helped spread the word.

“We always envisioned that this building was another step. I tell people that this is our year round facility. This isn’t our permanent facility.”

“I am excited for the summer but I am also concerned because last summer we had several days where we had more than 200 people come and that’s OK if they are not all in the building at the same time. But we are bumping up on our building capacity on some of that.

“Even on our regular days we were averaging 130-150 people here and people are still discovering us.”

To help meet that growing demand, Pratt is looking into grants that could pay for an outreach van to take the MESS Hall to more schools. That would save money for schools, which often have to do fundraisers to cover the cost of transportation to the museum for a field trip.

For example, it cost Scenic Heights Elementary $500 for field trips over three days to cover transportation and admission, Pratt says.

“It’s not inexpensive, especially with the poverty it our community, you can’t get to all the schools.”

Pratt thinks one of the keys to the MESS Hall’s success is the way it encourages interaction among families. She wants it to be a place where everyone in the family works and learns together, not just a place where the kids have fun and one parents trails the family carrying the coats.

“One thing that I see that I think is so important that I don’t see when I go to other museums or even data from other museums, we will have an adult sitting next to their child and they will work together.”

Perhaps too the MESS Hall can capitalize on the “Cosmos” effect, tied to the reboot of the series now hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and originated in 1980 with host Carl Sagan.

It is, she hopes, part of an effort to make science literacy important to the culture at large.

“If a kid comes and they do the parachute drop they don’t need to know fluid dynamics. I’m not trying to teach you the facts; I'm trying to teach you to get excited.”

That philosophy has caught the eye of the science museum community as well, who tell Pratt at their conventions that they are following the MESS Hall. One of those conversations laid the groundwork for Pratt to join an application from the Science Museum of Minnesota for a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The Science Museum of Minnesota grant proposal is for a Maker Network. It is loosely modeled on another program they have for nanotechnology. The MESS Hall has participated in that one as a pure recipient, where they have received programs they have developed for sharing at their site. Through this project, Pratt says, MESS Hall would be a more tightly integrated test site for the materials and programs.

"The folks involved contacted us so that we can provide a voice for smaller venues, since the leaders of the field are primarily the large museums," she says.

Pratt and the board consciously strive to differentiate the MESS Hall from typical science museums.

“That was part of our thinking, we didn’t want to be like the (Adventure Science Museum in Nashville) because when people from Nashville come here, we don’t want them to say “oh well its just a small version of what we have.”

“We have people who say ‘Are you a franchise?’”

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