If Ryan Alberts starts ripping apart all the electronics equipment around the house, his parents can fix the blame on self-described lab rat Melissa Goyette.
After all, part of Goyette's job is to teach kids how to peek inside machines--VCRs, computers, toasters and telephones--and try to figure out how they work.
"This is such a forbidden thing . . . something we were never allowed to do as kids," said Goyette, one of 14 rats employed by the DuPage Children's Museum in Wheaton. The lab RATS, which stands for Radical Approach To the Subject, visit Chicago-area schools to present math and science demonstrations. "All they see is this black box; it's a mystery. But they . . . can make it magical."
Goyette and her colleagues recently took their magical mystery demolition tour to the 5th-grade classrooms at Scott Elementary School in Naperville, where pupils spent two hours wielding wire cutters and needle-nose pliers.
"What's Inside?" is one of a dozen learning labs that the DuPage museum takes on the road and into schools. The in-school labs have become an enormously popular program for the museum, reaching about 22,000 pupils from more than 90 communities across the Chicago metropolitan area in the 1997-98 school year.
Robin Frisch, school programs manager, said the program started small about five years ago, involving about 250 Naperville-area pupils with one lab called Kids Design Engineering.
Frisch said the offerings and interest have increased exponentially over the past few years, in part because the museum has designed a variety of specialized programs that dovetail with art, science and math curricula in elementary schools and preschools.
For example, Naperville School District 203 has a contract with the museum to present its engineering lab to every 3rd grader in the district.
"Once we go into a school, they always ask us back," Frisch said. "Our focus is very hands-on. Kids are never just taught . . . about a subject."
That explains why the museum employees--all college-educated professionals--willingly embrace the title of lab RATS.
A former engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, Goyette said her part-time job at the museum has reawakened her desire to combine two passions: science and teaching.
But it has sparked a few odd obsessions as well, including a decidedly rodent-like habit of digging through trash as she seeks discarded machines for her demonstrations.
She and the other lab rats use thousands of the devices during the "What's Inside?" workshop, always careful to cut the cords off the machines and warn eager explorers to ask parents before taking a screwdriver to the old VCR.
Ryan's mother, Jane Alberts, was waiting for that last warning, although she admittedly is a lot more enthusiastic about the idea than she was before she spent a few hours watching her 11-year-old son and his classmates explore the guts of old gizmos.
"He loves to do this kind of thing, but I've never given him the opportunity to do it," Alberts said. "Before, I would say, `Oh, what a mess,' but now I think it's a great idea."
Teacher Carla Stanford said the program offered the perfect culmination to her lessons on simple machines, but one she could not have pulled off on her own.
For each class visit, the museum staff bring a few dozen toolboxes and a barrel full of discarded machines. The lab rats also offer the technical expertise to field detailed questions about motors and even perform a few tricks with a battery that get the broken equipment working.
Bringing this interactive know-how to schools has become an important mission for many children's museums across the nation, said Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the Association of Youth Museums.
Last year, the 180 member museums reported reaching 3.8 million children in off-site visits, many of them at schools.
Stanford smiled as she watched her students marvel over their discoveries, which they hoarded in bags and even traded with their classmates.
While the exercise sometimes uncovers a few budding scientists or engineers, it also is designed to teach kids about using real tools--an experience they might not have at home unless they see their parents fixing things, the lab rats said.
Connie Wang and Kelly Petrauskas worked as a team to tear apart a telephone, but their fascination with the circuit board inside was sparked more by its artistic possibilities than its scientific purpose.
"Ooh, these look like beads; they're so pretty," said Kelly, running her finger along the brightly colored resistors. "I'd like to take these apart and put them in my bead collection."
The museum charges the schools $130 for every on-site learning lab, but manager Frisch said the museum does not make any money on the program.