Volume 2, No. 3. February 8, 2002
A park with class
Teachers have a number of interactive tools at hand when imparting history curriculums
to their students. They have text books, audio-visual aides and, for many classrooms,
the internet. Ideal would be taking the whole classroom to the land of the lesson;
to study ancient Egypt, take them to Egypt. To study dinosaurs, take them to
a Triassic-era island.
Barring that, take them to the nearest theme park.
That presumption has generated significant mid-week shoulder season traffic
for Gardaland in Castelnuovo del Garda, Italy. The theme park, which prides
itself on accurately themed environments, rides and shows, has set up a series
of classroom programs using its attractions to illustrate lessons in history
and biology for schools in northern Italy. The initiative, in turn, has led
to new meeting facilities that have helped build corporate group sales for the
park.
Because of a 1991 national law restricting out-of-school trips for classrooms,
"Teachers had to justify excursions," said Roberta Brentarolli, sales manager
at Gardaland. "It's difficult justifying a trip to an amusement park. Since
we had the possibility to give them something more, a biology lesson or history
lesson, why not offer that in combination with a day in the amusement park?
It was a good solution." One of Gardaland's attractions, the Dolphinarium, provided
a natural fit. School groups could attend lectures by biologists in a 100-seat
classroom then attend one of the daily Dolphinarium shows. With a half-dozen
lessons a day, the program has generated about 12,000 visits a year.
A more creative program arose from one of the park's popular dark rides, the
Valley of the Kings housed in a thematic 1:2-scale replica of the temple
of Abu Simbel in Egypt. With input from an archaeology society in Milan and
a local history museum, Gardaland put together sample curricula, complete with
accompanying workbooks and in-house lecturers. "Each year we concentrate on
a separate subject," Brentarolli said. "One year it was on Tutankhamen and the
discovery of his tomb, another year on pharaohs, another on interpreting hieroglyphics,"
of which the Valley of the Kings offers plenty of hands-on samples. As
for the notion of using a theme ride in place of the real thing, Brentarolli
said, "That's the role of the teacher, to explain the difference between fake
and real."
Offered the past five years, the Egyptian program has brought some 20,000 students
to the park each year, proving so popular that Gardaland has built a 600-seat
meeting room for the program. With that room, the park in 1999 began offering
meeting space to local companies who rent the park for product launches and
anniversaries, Brentarolli said. "Software companies want to be as strange as
possible," she said, and Revlon Cosmetics likes using Gardaland for special
events. "An amusement park is normally cheaper than any big restaurant, and
you engage people all day."
Gardaland also tried to build a history lesson about knights based on its medieval
tournament show. "That was nice, but it didn't have the same impact; Egyptians
are much more fashionable," Brentarolli said. But this year, the ancients have
been supplanted by an even earlier but more fashionable population: dinosaurs,
a lesson triggered by the park's booking the Iwerks 3D film Dino Island
at its motion theater. "We'll have a paleontologist lecture on dinosaurs and
make reference to the film, which has many dinosaurs from different periods
acting at the same time: the paleontologist will point that out," Brentarolli
said. Based on a test run of the program in September for 900 teachers, the
park knows it has another winner. "Teachers are extremely skeptical," Brentarolli
said. "You have to be so careful not to disappoint them. We had many, many teachers
write us to say it was 'Great,' 'Fantastic,' 'Well done.'"