Amy Welborn disses children’s science museums:
… I hate Children’s Science Museums.
…I’ve been taking children to science museums for 20 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 1 or 2 kids on any of those occasions do anything but race around madly, randomly punching buttons to see what the effect is, then racing around to the next thing. No one reads the explanations unless they’re forced to, and I’ve never felt that a lick of learning was going on.
In many ways I agree. Certainly that’s how my 5-year-old experiences the science museum — as an endless variety of buttons to push. But they are pretty cool to the nerdy teenage type that I was, if they’re well designed. And as an adult with an engineering background, I still enjoy them. (Now, of course, there’s the added layer of evaluation — could I do a better job designing this wind tunnel demo? Are all the explanations accurate?)
I think perhaps the best age to start going to the science museum is about twelve.
We have a good one in St. Paul, MN. Recently my family visited, and I had to keep reminding my husband that this is how you go to the museum with little kids — you let them play with the stuff.
In a couple of years when my son can read a little better, I’m planning to try a little homeschooling experiment: get an unlimited-visit pass and come for an hour or so, once a week, for the entire school year. If I say, "ok kids, we’ve got thirty minutes to work on THIS DEMONSTRATION RIGHT HERE," will he learn something?
I figure the first three or four visits, of course, will have to be "run around and get the whole museum out of your system" work.
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