Flagship project · Active in Visakhapatnam and the rural Eastern Ghats

What's in the box?

Built for hands-on exploration that evokes wonder and facilitates natural history learning.

A natural history museum that fits in one trunk and travels to classrooms, community halls, gardens and living rooms, wherever curious minds gather. Nothing sits behind glass. Everything is real, tactile, and most of it can be found right around us.

Invite the museum → Watch the film ▶

Open trays from the museum trunk, filled with feathers, seed pods, shells, sea urchins, butterflies, beetles and fungi

1 trunk · 250+ real specimens

250+real specimens, from seeds to snake sheds

1 houra typical hands-on session

Anywhereclassrooms, halls, gardens, homes

All ageschildren first, grown-ups welcome

See it in action

Watch a session unfold: the box opens, hands go up, and questions start tumbling out.

Inside the trunk

Hundreds of real things, packed tray by tray. Every one of them has a story, and most of them came from places we walk past every day.

Seeds and pods

Long, oval, spiked and winged: a lesson in how plants travel.

Feathers

Flight, warmth and colour, and the hidden science in each one.

Shells and starfish

Treasures from our coast, and the animals that built them.

Insects and butterflies

Beetles, cicadas and butterflies to study up close, wing by wing.

Moults and skin sheds

A wolf spider's moult and a snake's old skin: proof of growing up.

Fungi

Including a giant umbrella-shaped Ganoderma, the decomposers' star.

Nests

Woven bird nests and little mud pots built by potter wasps.

Fossils

Life from millions of years ago, turned to stone, and now small enough to hold.

Tracks and signs

A log drilled by a carpenter bee, and other clues animals leave behind.

Caution · How we collect

Every specimen is ethically collected

Nothing in the museum was taken alive. Most items were found already dead or shed, picked up from roads, paths and the ground, and they are kept purely for education.

We do not encourage anyone to collect from nature, and we condemn collecting wildlife unethically. If you find something, look closely, take a photo, and leave it where it is.

Every object tells a story

A potter wasp's mud nest

A mother potter wasp builds a nest like this from wet mud, one small ball at a time. She packs each cell with caterpillars for her young, seals it and flies away. The round holes are where the new wasps chewed their way out.

You don't need a forest to find one. Look on the walls of your school or home, under window ledges, behind doors and on twigs nearby. Once children have held this nest in the museum, they start spotting them everywhere.

Potter waspBuilt from mudLook on your walls

How a session works

About an hour, led by a nature educator. No lecture: just real objects, good questions, and time to wonder.

01
The box opens

The trunk goes on the table. The lid comes up. Nobody says a word.
02
Look closely

Specimens go hand to hand, gently and under supervision, with magnifying glasses.
03
Ask and sketch

What is this? Who made it? Children sketch, guess and question.
04
Head outdoors

Then out to the school wall, the garden or the park, to find the living versions.
05
Share what we found

Finds become stories, charts and conversations. Experience becomes knowledge when it's shared.

What children take away

An hour with the museum changes how children look at the world around them. Here's what we see, session after session.

Wonder comes first

Real objects spark the "what is this?" moment that makes children want to find out more.
Learning through touch

Holding a feather, a shell or a seed pod uses every sense, so what children learn stays with them.
Looking closely

Magnifying glasses and sketching train children to notice shape, texture, pattern and change.
Asking better questions

Who made this? Why is it shaped like that? Children learn to wonder, guess and check, the habits behind all science.
Science they can see

Life cycles, adaptation, seed dispersal and decomposers become real, and link to what children study in class.
Nature next door

After a session, children start spotting nests, moults and seeds around their own school and home, and caring for them.

The story in pictures

"What's in the box?" A day the museum came to school, as an illustrated story. Swipe or scroll sideways.

A nature educator rides a motorbike over green hills, a trunk on the back, specimens flying out behind him — 1/9 The museum rides in, over the hills.

Children in a classroom watch through the window as the educator carries the trunk in — 2/9 Another ordinary morning. Then: "What's in that box?!"

Wide-eyed children crowd around the open trunk on a classroom table — 3/9 He put it on the table. Then he opened it. Nobody said a word.

Trays of specimens fan out around the open trunk: seeds, insects, butterflies, shells, fungi and feathers — 4/9 Inside were hundreds of real things. Every one of them had a story.

Children examine beetles, feathers, shells and butterflies at their desks — 5/9 Nobody looked at it the same way.

Children gather around a table with mud pots made by potter wasps, asking questions — 6/9 Experience becomes knowledge when it's shared.

Children explore the school grounds with notebooks and magnifying glasses; below, the eight things they found — 7/9 Everything we found, in one morning.

By afternoon the children explore the school garden on their own, one looking at fern spores through a lens — 8/9 By the afternoon, nobody was waiting to be told what to look at.

Children point at charts of the specimens in the corridor; a girl looks out at a sunbird through the window — 9/9 The box went down the hill to the next school. The looking stayed.

Where the museum goes

It's portable, so it sets up wherever people are.

Schools

Classrooms and campuses

Single sessions or multi-day museum residencies that link to the curriculum and send children outdoors.

Schoolgirls in uniform crowd around a specimen jar, one peering at it wide-eyed

Communities

Apartments and community halls

Open-air sessions for families in residential societies and neighbourhood spaces.

Families sit on the grass in a park around open specimen trays as the educator holds up a seed

Public spaces

Libraries, parks and festivals

A pop-up museum table that draws a crowd of all ages.

Children sit around low red tables in a library as the educator shows them seed pods

Workplaces and institutions

Offices and CSR days

An hour that gets grown-ups looking at the world outside the window again.

A hall full of smiling participants, including two naval officers, behind tables of specimen trays

In the news · The Hindu, 2 May 2025

"Secret lives of spiders and seeds"

The Hindu's Nivedita Ganguly joined a museum session at a residential society in Visakhapatnam and wrote about children and adults leaning in over spider moults, seed pods and a giant mushroom.

"We came away looking at trees, soil, fungi, and even insects very differently."
Rachita Gupta, parent, in The Hindu

Where we are headed

The museum started in Visakhapatnam. Next, it travels to schools across the rural Eastern Ghats.

So far500+participants have already experienced the museum
2026–2720schools on the road this year
2027–28100+schools as the museum grows

Support the museum

Fund a session for a school

Many children in rural government schools never get to visit a museum. You can bring one to them. Sponsor a museum session for a school, or a whole term of them, as an individual, a group or through CSR.

Reach out to discuss → +91 73308 80274