I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

When I was a kid in the ’80s, one of my two favorite places on Earth was The Franklin Institute (TFI) in downtown Philadelphia. We lived a couple hours away so a visit was a rare and precious thing. I think I only visited two or three times but it left an indelible impression on me. I remember wandering in amazement through its enormous spaces getting to actually play with amazing and interesting things. I remember sweeping off a table and then filling an overhanging funnel pendulum with sand, setting it going, and watching it create unexpected patterns on the table. I remember running through the gigantic model heart with other kids. I remember the overpowering joy of being in an actual monumental marble temple of curiosity and fascination. So I was filled with anticipation a couple weeks ago when, during a family trip to the East Coast, we managed to squeeze in a visit to TFI with our six-year-old son. We parked and ran in, paid close to ninety bucks (ouch! but I love you, so take my money), and started off on the top floor with the Wondrous Space exhibit. And were met with screens. Design your own rocket! it said (or something like that). No, I thought, this isn’t designing a rocket, this is playing a lame video game on a touchscreen. Yes, there were space-related artifacts around the walls, and a spacesuit in its own large case, but you couldn’t touch any of this stuff, you couldn’t play with it, you could just look at it for a few seconds, read the placard, say “huh”, and maybe point out some interesting feature to the kiddo. But the screens were given pride of place, dead center in the dimly-lit space. And so they beckoned. My wife — a science writer who used to be the only staff writer covering space for New Scientist and before that, worked at NASA — poked at one of these with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless. She led our son gently but firmly away to the glorious four-story Foucault pendulum which hangs in a stairwell. Here are some images from the website showing patrons interacting with (or running past) screens so you can see what I’m talking about: But the screens were all over the place. There were on the main floor, in another section of Wondrous Space, and in the Body Odyssey exhibit. They were all over the SportsZone exhibit on the top floor. Many of them are connected to body motion sensors a la Xbox Kinect so you don’t need to touch them, but they’re still just video games, where the action-response feedback loop is provided by software, not the universe itself. And the wonderful hands-on physical stuff that I loved as a kid? Jammed into out-of-the-way spaces in the Sir Isaac’s Loft and Air Show rooms. These rooms are terrific, and I was delighted to see they were absolutely packed with kids playing with stuff. No screens, just objects and forces — you don’t even need to read anything to enjoy many of the exhibits, such as the one where you sit in one of two chairs hanging from different configurations of block-and-tackle and haul yourself up — and then just let yourself drop, cushioned by a damping piston. Tucked far away in a desolate corner by a hallway we discovered an engaging exhibit where you pluck rods with your finger to generate Lissajous curves from the vibrations. My son was fascinated; he had never seen anything behave like that. And in the Air Show room he liked many of the exhibits, like the one where you (apparently) evacuate a cylinder to see the effect that has on objects moving through it (versus a control). And the “shimmer wall”, where kids generate sound waves using a variety of devices and can then see the sound waves impacting on a reflective and reactive surface was wonderful and really conveys the mechanical nature of sound. But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with. For instance, they have the classic “bicycle wheel and rotating stool” gyro effect demonstration, but the wheel was too large a diameter for my son to hold, and the stool seemed to have too much friction to work properly for my wife. There was no one trying to use it before or after us; I’d be curious to see the data on how many visitors attempt it, and how well it usually works for them. And that one should be trivial to design and implement properly: for crying out loud, our local ice cream shop has stools that spin on ball bearings, and I think that would be a big improvement. Every time something didn’t work right I couldn’t help thinking: we paid almost ninety bucks to visit this place. TFI doesn’t seem poor; it seems like its budgetary priorities lie elsewhere. And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided. I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions. Come back to it when you’re an old man or woman, it will still be here, and you will see it with different eyes. This is a tiny but, to me, beautiful part of the human condition. And what made the Franklin Institute so amazingly special to me as a kid was that the exhibits sat at the intersection of things that kids want to play with, things that kids are allowed to play with, and things that demonstrate some “hey, that’s cool!” scientific phenomenon. And it was all real. But a lame video game? I can do that on my goddamn phone. TFI “was one of the first museums in the nation to offer a hands-on approach to learning about the physical world”, but — and I can’t emphasize this enough, it’s my whole reason for writing this — touchscreens are not actually hands-on. Digital representations aren’t tangible, and touchscreen experiences just don’t activate a kid’s brain (including, I’d say, a sense of delight) the same way a genuinely hands-on experience, like pulling hard on a rope to raise your chair, does. I don’t know why museums are doing this; my idle speculation is that they see themselves as competing with screens for attention, so in a kind of experiential race to the bottom, they feel compelled to bring screens into their exhibits (see: Amusing Ourselves to Death). But now more than ever in history, kids need a break from the screens that all too many of them are sadly often plugged into by default, and connection to the real world instead. Now is the time for TFI — and all museums — to take a stand against the tidal wave of digital garbage that is consuming humanity, especially kids, by eliminating all of their touchscreen “exhibits”. To be fair, TFI is still pretty damn great if you just ignore all the screens. The Franklin Memorial rotunda (free to visit!) is gorgeous. The hands-on stuff, tucked away and apparently suffering from neglect though it is, should be replicated in every city in the world. But it would be so much better if they removed all the screens and put that budget and real estate toward the real, tangible, interactive science exhibits that were the reason the museum was created in the first place, and what made me love it as a child.