Bringing History to Life—Engineering Students Parnter with Museum to Create Storytelling Phone

By Christi Mays

Thanks to the help of three engineer­ing students volunteering their skills and free time this last semester, a fun, new interactive phone will help bring the stories of Elli Moore Townsend to life at the Musick Alumni Center and Museum at the Parker House.

In a collaboration between the museum and the engineering depart­ment, the future engineers took an an­tique pay phone and stripped its inner workings. They added the compo­nents needed to play recorded stories through the receiver, and a text dis­play for anyone with hearing impair­ments. Whenever someone walks by the phone, a motion detector activates it to ring to capture attention.

Participants can choose one of 10 stories from the days Elli ran the Cot­tage Home for girls. One such story narrates how the girls who lived in the Cottage Home would often save their stamp money by not writing their weekly letter home. They gave the pennies they saved to the Cottage Home so other girls could come too.

“There are constant stories of God’s provision at the exact time when Elli needed it,” said Beth Nor­vell, associate director of Museum and Alumni Engagement.

Many of Elli’s stories have lived untold in the museum archives for more than a century. Most of the voices sharing the stories on the phone are of students or alumni who received the Townsend Memorial Scholarship, which makes the project even more special.

The phone will be part of the new Elli Moore Townsend exhibit that will be ready for visitors in April. Once renovated, the room will resem­ble one of the original cottages where the girls lived, featuring shiplap wood paneling and a map with an overlay to show where the small dwellings were probably located on campus.

For more than a year, Beth and Dr. Matt Kuester, assistant professor of engineering, have been brainstorm­ing to find the perfect project that his students could work on with the museum. For several days each week throughout the semester, junior David Darrah, freshman Ali Mohamed Jassani and Caden Kuhn, a dual-cred­it high school junior from Salado, worked on programming and assem­bling the phone.

“I really appreciate the fact that students created this,” said Beth. “It’s really important to have elements in the museum that we’ve partnered with other departments on.”