A day at the museum

I’m in California for a few days with my family, and today we went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. For those who don’t know it, the Exploratorium is one of the best and most famous hands-on science museums in the world. Imagine an aircraft-hanger sized space filled with stations that let visitors experiment with phenomena in physics, biology, mathematics–and even some magic.

We had a chance to play with gyroscopic forces, take mini psychology tests, see optical illusions, experiment with a vacuum, build a catenary arch, generate a wave, and see ourselves “fly” in angled mirrors. Great stuff. While trying out all of these stations at the museum, we had a chance to talk about why bicycles work–and why you are more stable if you ride fast, which is a particularly salient topic for my daughter who is learning to ride without training wheels. We talked about Galileo, and card-counting, and standing waves, and a bunch of other good science topics.

After our visit to the museum, we had a picnic outside on the lawn at the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Exploratorium is located. While we were eating, I asked my kids: “Did you have a good time at the museum?”

Their reply was instantaneous and enthusiastic:

“Yes, it was really fun!”

Encouraged, I asked: “So, what did you learn?”

There was a LOOOOONG pause, like the slightly embarrassed silence you hear in a class when no one has done their homework. Finally, my younger daughter said:

“Well, I didn’t really LEARN anything. I mean, I saw things that I didn’t know could happen. But it was more just fun than learning.”

I have lots of friends and colleagues who are museum educators, and I could imagine them cringing. Then my older daughter–with the savvy of an elementary school student–said more diplomatically:

“Well, when we made the wave, I learned that sometimes if you push on one thing, lots of other things get moved after it if they are connected to it. I mean, life is kind of like that, you know?”

Now, I had to admire both her pluck in providing that particular answer to the question, and her ability to accomplish that most important of educational outcomes: Transfer of understanding from one domain to another. She will be well served in school by that ability to think on her feet.

However, I also couldn’t help but think that here we had spent almost two hours in one of the best science museums under practically ideal conditions for learning. The adult/child ratio was 1/1. The adults were both literate in science, and could ask probing questions, provide background information, and encourage reflection. And yet for all that, there was little to show for it in this admittedly crude measure.

What I observed in the museum is that while the conditions were practically ideal, they were missing one critical thing:

Time.

Exhibits at the museum are designed for engagement measured in minutes–and sometimes in seconds. Even if you wanted to linger, it felt inappropriate to take up any one activity for too long, as there were always other visitors waiting.

Computer games are often criticized because they take up so much time–kids spend so long playing them that parents worry they may be ignoring other important things in their life. But part of the power of games–particularly games that are about things that matter in the world–is that they give players a chance for sustained engagement of a kind that museums just aren’t designed to provide. So when games are played under similarly ideal conditions–as I described in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, well-designed games with knowledgeable adults on hand–they can lead to deep understanding of complex ideas.

That’s how we try to design epistemic games–and why they take 60-80 hours to play. Because, not surprisingly, it is hard to learn about complex things in just a few seconds or minutes.

My colleague Kevin Crowley writes about how visits to a museum let parents give kids “explanatoids“: little scientific explanations that build over time into deep scientific understanding. But in a sense this is only saying that you can play a long game in short bursts over time.

That’s almost certainly true. But for my own kids today at one of the best museums in the world, a little more time to play the game would have gone a long way.