On Monday, Labor Day, we headed for the Boston Museum of Science. I had been there at the 9yo’s age and fondly remembered the giant van de Graaff generators and the lightning show, which to my delight is still running.
This is on the same peninsula with where we are staying in Charlestown, so we walked there. There is a long viaduct to cross, which took us over a lot of railroad tracks and an exciting construction site.
The Boston Museum of Science is a good-sized museum with a lot of well-designed exhibits. I think the designers of the permanent exhibits here have done a better job, on the whole, than the ones at the Science Museum of Minnesota. They seem to invite kids to sit down and interact for a longer time, rather than running around whamming buttons.
Among the many imaginary jobs I fantasize about having is “science museum exhibit designer.” I would like to study what sorts of features encourage different sorts of people to spend more time with the material.
As it is I am only left with a visitor’s impressions, not data, and of course the problem is that I am a particular sort of person, and probably an oddball of a visitor myself.
One example of the kind of thing I think about in science museums: It seems to me that a linear design that nudges you to pass by things one at a time (deciding at each location on the path whether to stay longer or move on) is better for deep engagement than the sort of exhibit where a big open room has many freestanding stations scattered about. But maybe the big open room works better when sixty field-trip children descend on it at once. This museum had a mix of both, though, and they both worked pretty well. I must say it is a lot easier to go with Mark than if it is just me.
One thing that surprised me: a number of exhibits involved animated models that in my opinion worked extremely well. There was a hands-on flow-of-a-river exhibit tucked away in a corner. From a distance I saw the 9yo playing with it, moving blocks around in the river, and thought, “Oh, it’s like the river model in the Mill City Museum at home, where you build structures in a channel of moving water and see how the flow changes.” But when I got closer I realized that the river was animated via projection from the ceiling, and switching out the blocks triggered a change in the story the animations were telling. So—an interactive animation with a lot of physicality. It didn’t teach the same thing as a flowing water channel wet lab, but it did what it did very well.
Another pleasant surprise was that my 5yo, unlike all his siblings at that age, was relatively uninterested in running around whamming buttons to see if anything would happen in less than two seconds. He wanted to sit down and work his way through things, and spend lots of time on a single exhibit. Such as working through a lovely little interactive where you get to touch and examine an animal skull, and then (by pressing buttons that let you make binary choices) decide which of three animals the skull came from. Was it predator or prey? Have a varied diet or a monotonous one? Did it have a strong bite or a weak one?
He sat there, with me and later his sister, reading the questions to him, and went through all six skulls.
Another thing he got totally absorbed in was a game where you select from a bin three different malaria-mitigation measures for a population of at-risk individuals, constrained by a rudimentary budget, and find out how well the combination worked based on how many animated mosquitos disappear from the screen. We had to entice him away.
As promised, we made it to the lightning show. I was delighted, once inside the Theater of Electricity, to discover that the whole room was essentially unchanged from when I visited in the eighties. The leaping aluminum disk, pinging into the air and clattering back down every few minutes as museum visitors charged the electromagnet and released it, I had forgotten but remembered as soon as I heard it again. There is a decidedly old-school exhibit on the history of mathematics tucked into the back: it has not changed either. I remember the model of the Mobius strip, a little mechanized arrow clicking along on a track, traversing the whole thing to demonstrate its one-sidedness. Lots of text and pictures. Nobody would make this exhibit today. But I remember it with fondness.
And of course there is the world’s largest van de Graaff generator. I walked around it, running my hands over the smooth wooden railing, and felt the same as I did at age eight when it towered above me, because of course it still does.
And my 9yo loved the show, so there’s that.
Later, after a long rest in the apartment, we ventured out in the pouring rain to a pizza restaurant at the other end of Charlestown. It had a stellar beer and wine list and great food. We split a few pizzas and salads, and I drank a sour named after a banh mi sandwich and then discovered a Ligurian rosé on the menu, which I never ever ever see, so I had to have that, and it was awesome.
The little guy was still tired, and didn’t have much appetite. He needed his sister’s hat and a napkin cape to stay warm, and later ate cereal in the apartment. Hurray for a kitchen.
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