Science exhibits for the young

Abstract

Young children often have a difficult time with museum exhibits, especially in the areas of science and technology-most exhibits simply are not developed to their scale, comprehension, and interest level. There is little opportunity for learning by playing, and the concepts sometimes are complex; as a result, museum-going can become an unpleasant and/or unproductive experience for pre-school and primary-school children. Recognizing these inherent problems, an increasing number of American natural history, science and technology, and children’s museums have introduced special participatory exhibits for young boys and girls that deal with natural phenomena, scientific principles, and technological applications. These exhibits seek to stimulate the curiosity of the young, and to make it easy and interesting to touch, interact with, enjoy, and learn from the objects and other exhibit units. The concept of playful learning is not new. Many participatory science and children’s museums have followed this precept for years, but it has been only in the last decade or so that the focus has been on special exhibits for the young. Among the early museums with ‘hands-on’ science exhibits in the 1930s were the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Franklin Institute Science Museum, Philadelphia, and the Cleveland Health Museum, but they did not have special early childhood exhibits. One of the first special science exhibits for the young was developed at the Schenectady Museum in upstate New York in 1960. It was an exhibition of cross-sections of common-place things and other objects, and Museum Director Donald S. Smith got the idea from his %year-old daughter who always was asking ‘how and why’ questions. Called ‘Halls of Adventure’, the exhibit consisted largely of cross-sections of items such as a baseball, parking meter, toaster, traffic light, clock, coconut, stalk of corn, and fire extinguisher. Among the other materials in the exhibit were a chick embryo, a plastic model of a human body, and various stuffed animals. Smith sought to show children ‘the inside of a wide variety of things they see from outside’. The objects had to be things with which children were familiar, things which were interesting inside, and which were readily available at little or no cost. Two other developments during this period merit mention-a science gallery at the Morristown (New Jersey) Junior Museum, and the Junior League House of Science in Binghamton, New York. The Morristown Museum, which opened in 1957, worked with local industries in installing a small science gallery with working models of an electromagnet, telephone, solar battery, and rocket engine. In 1961, the Binghamton Museum sought to ‘challenge, inform, and inspire’ children in the sciences with participatory exhibits on astronomy, weather, early flight, and space exploration, under