Making an exhibit

To follow up on my previous review of KC Cole's book about the Exploratorium, here's a nifty exhibit called "How People Make Things." It's a traveling exhibit (by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, not the Exploratorium) that demonstrates the basics of manufacturing processes like injection molding and assembly.

It's interesting to compare the experience you may imagine having in the exhibit room above to the experience of the website, which uses a one-directional lecture mode (warning: be prepared for the Mr. Rogers cameo). It's ironically difficult to successfully translate hands-on exhibits to the web, even though the web is supposedly so interactive. (I used to argue constantly with people who wanted to put dissection labs online - that's helpful for kids without access to a real lab, but if you can do a real dissection, it's infinitely better, because they have an open-ended, self-directed learning experience). I think it's analogous to writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure or roleplaying video game: a small selection of choices is antithetical to an immersive experience, but offering more choices makes things exponentially harder to execute.

It's also very interesting to listen to this short clip of an exhibit designer talking about troubleshooting an activity in which hot wax is poured into a mold. I'm not sure this particular educator is very satisfied with the end result. You can also see a lot more of this kind of process in Jon Else's 1982 documentary about the Exploratorium, in which you see the staff troubleshooting three physics exhibits.