Comments from the  MOXI Museum in Santa Barbara.  They liked the Golden Ratio Calipers and decided to make their own and set up a self guided exhibit.

They’ve got some great advice for any museum interested in doing this too.

“I have in fact used your files in a crude way and brought out some ratio calipers in my museum’s makerspace! We did a month of “Making and Playing with Scale” as our guiding theme, so I saw that as an opportunity to include the notion of ratios and proportionality. I paired the caliper exploration with a pattern-generating making activity which I found here.

I ended up only making a cardboard prototype version of the calipers, but they seemed to do the trick. Something I was curious about was scaling the files up and down. I presume that locking the dimensions and scaling down would maintain the ratios, but I think it would be handy to have files with multiple sizes in the future.

It would also be so neat to have easy access to a file with appropriate images for investigation and measuring. I did a lot of digging on google to find large enough files that easily made the point.

Lastly, in my space, I didn’t have this as a directly facilitated station. There wasn’t a staff person assigned to work with folks as they chose to participate here as there were many other things happening in the space simultaneously. If you’re looking at distributing these resources for venues like museums, you may consider drafting some signage or “instructional” content that would support guests/learners in approaching and participating most effectively. “