Frequently Asked Questions

The Earth Balloon allows learners an interactive experience like no other - to actually enter the Earth. There, they can engage in a variety of subject areas including science, math, history, languages, music, and more. It offers incredible flexibility for schools and organizations to use it as their needs dictate!

The first Earth Balloon was designed by an architect in the early 1970s as an 8-foot prototype for college students in Minnesota and hand painted by a local entrepreneur/artist. From there, it was expanded in size and a zipper was installed allowing people to enter the Earth, all while being inflated by a box fan. Eventually, NASA satellite images were incorporated, therefore eliminating the need for hand painting. 

Smile Big World works with students of all ages, from elementary school through college and beyond but is most commonly used with Kindergarten through 8th grade.

Each organization has different needs, but there are some common themes. Start by deciding how many people you'd like to offer the experience to, then consider how many hours in a day you have. The Earth Balloon can accommodate up to 25 people at a time. Then calculate how long each session would be. Normally this is around 10-20 minutes, but could be up to 30 minutes if desired.

See the following example:

• You can dedicate 6 hours of the day and have roughly 600 students
• Knowing this, you could hold 15-minute lessons with 25 students each
• This would equal roughly 16 lessons per day for 2 days, allowing a few minutes for transition in between classes