Working with a concept provided by the museum, Chicago Scenic designed and built a permanent 35-foot-tall tree house with three levels and surrounded by interactive games designed to help children discover the life cycle of trees and the animals that inhabit them.

Chicago Scenic created an interactive display on the first level that focused on how a tree absorbs nutrients from the ground, and installed a giant climbing net between the first and second floors.

The second level includes an interactive game, for which CSSI provided a faux hollowed-out tree trunk, called “Animal Apartments”, which helps children discover the different types of animals that might live in a log. That level also includes a set of “bug binoculars” that enables children to see the world with segmented vision – just like flies do.

The third level is handicap/wheelchair accessible and equipped with a kid-operated wind machine that blows seedpods and leaves suspended from the tree. The third level also features crank handles that move the wings of bees, butterflies, and dragonflies flying overhead.

Chicago Scenic also provided scenic elements for many of the interactive activities centered around the tree house. For the “What’s a Living Thing” activity, an interactive game to help children determine if something is alive or not, CSSI created a large display panel with graphics of different objects and doors that reveal the correct answer. For the “Prairie” activity, Chicago Scenic rehabbed an existing cave and created a built-in periscope kids can use to view a prairie and the animals that live there.