Public understanding: applying models to solving real problems

St. Louis children´s Aquarium was founded as a not-for-profit organisation in 1971. In 1989, it organised its heretofore egalitarian efforts to build an aqarium and provide education, research and conservation programming as a response to an assessment based identified need in the community. This instrument pointed to various instructional needs from pre-K to graduate level, from hands-on learning to library resources to actual research and professional opportunities to instruct the various publics involved in the aquatic sciences. By 1993, over 300,000 people were served directly through outreach educational activities, and decisively, research practices were devised to apply scientific to efforts to solving real environment issues.