Good, Bad, Missing, Modified

A lot worked well in the Children’s Museum. It was a fun place with lots of opportunity for safe active play. Morgan could run wild, spin knobs, push buttons, climb and crawl unimpeded. Many exhibits provided an opportunity for adult instruction. She enjoyed various installations that challenged her normal sensory perceptions, like the forced perspective room, the self-propelled zoetrope and distorting mirrors. The museum has a big stairway so that kids can run up and down between floors, rather than waiting for elevators or other adult-type conveyances. The museum presents children with a crawling tunnel right at the entrance so they can immediately begin to play. This sets the tone for each visit.
However, many features of the museum fell short of providing an instructional environment. There were plenty of detailed signs but most children weren’t of reading age. Even if they had been, the playful atmosphere presented by so many colored lights and physical interaction points was far too distracting for reading. Many lessons were highly abstract, to the point that the adults needed to stop and read directions in several places to discover what exactly the interaction was supposed to teach, and sometimes even how to proceed. Several installations were clearly designed with a highly formalized interaction in mind. These failed terribly as kids ran up and spun the knobs as hard as they could before running away. game worked even when broken. The Alice in Wonderland theme was intertwined throughout the exhibit space, but it would be very surprising if any child could understand the story simply from jumping and spinning knobs. Parents often tried to supply the missing instructional guidance, but the museum provided very little for them to go on. Exhibits construed to provide the basics of physics might be just as mystifying to the lay parent as they would be to the toddlers. Several installations were broken, but as long as the spinning functions were intact it hardly seemed to matter. (This is an interesting lesson for toy designers. If your toy can still be fun after it has broken, then you’re on to something.) The space as a whole seemed to be a science museum that had been repurposed into a high-energy playground—good for exercise, socialization and adult-child bonding while not so good for child education.