A New Kind of Exhibit: Where Visitors Do Science


  • How does the shape of a fish affect its ability to escape from a hungry shark?
  • What factors produce the best design for a solar car?
  • Do Styrofoam cups really keep coffee hotter longer than paper cups?
  • How does the way a question is asked affect the results of a survey?
  • Do pennies get heavier or lighter as they get older?
  • How do circus tightrope walkers use gravity to amaze our senses?

    These are just a few of the questions that Museum visitors answer for themselves at Investigate! A See-For-Yourself Exhibit. Investigate!  is the second step in the Museum's long-range exhibit plan, and it represents an exciting new way to learn in the Museum.


    Touching Snakes

    The Museum has a history of interactive exhibits dating back to 1950, when the first temporary science museum building opened at its current site on the old Charles River Dam. Unlike its natural history predecessors, the new Museum of Science was full of things to handle and buttons to push. Visitors could touch a snake, or activate a variety of machines and demonstrations of physical phenomena.
    In the 1970s, the Museum opened its first computer exhibit, and a new kind of interactive exhibit was born. Visitors could play games and simulate demonstrations in ways that could not be done with real physical objects. Interactive videodisk technology made this all more realistic in the 1980s, giving visitors the chance to solve the water crisis of a hypothetical town, or explore the mysteries of plate tectonics and continental drift. As Museum staff experimented with new technologies for creating interactive exhibits, the Museum kept the best of past exhibit styles, retaining a component of natural history, and assembling an eclectic mix of both subject matter and mode of interaction.
    At the same time, the Exploratorium in San Francisco was developing its own distinct style of interactive exhibit, one that allowed much more physical manipulation than the traditional push-button type does. The Exploratorium's exhibits often involved visitors in carrying out a complex set of activities. They were created by scientists and artists as do-it-yourself projects, and exhibit development was almost always halted before exhibits reached a final polished form-a feature that made the exhibits "working prototypes". Exploratorium exhibits have been copied in science museums around the world.

    Practicing Science

    In 1989, the Museum of Science embarked upon a new course in exhibit development that put a twist on the Exploratorium's exhibit organizational scheme. Rather than group exhibits together around content themes like waves or pendulums, the Museum would create groupings of interactive exhibits around process themes like observation and experimentation. The groupings were aimed at giving visitors practice in observing and experimenting, and in a number of other scientific thinking skills as well.
    This new kind of exhibit was already in our thinking when a report published by the Educational Testing Service in January 1989, revealed that students in the United States had fallen behind others, not in their knowledge of memorized scientific facts, but in applying their thinking skills to solving problems. A month later Science for All Americans,  a report on a three-year study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called for massive changes in the way science is taught. One key message struck home: "People learn to do well what they practice doing." Whether it is piano playing, basketball, or science, people have to practice it to learn how to do it. This idea is at the heart of the Museum's new exhibit plan.
    Science for All Americans  has been a catalyst for the science education reform movement currently underway in this country. When the report was published, Museum staff asked ourselves if we were in any way inadvertently contributing to the problem, and if there was in fact some way in which we could contribute to its solution.
    We presented a proposal for a new longrange exhibit plan, called Science Is an Activity,  to the Trustees of the Museum and to the National Science Foundation, just a few months after the publication of the AAAS report. The Trustees approved the plan, and the NSF awarded the Museum $1.1 million to carry out the first stage — The Observatory: A Place for Seeing the Unseen  and related new and refurbished exhibits.
    The Seeing the Unseen  activity center was immediately one of the most popular areas of the Museum. It draws together interactive exhibits from many fields of science, to give visitors practice with their own observational skills. Its activities involve taking a closer look to see things not immediately apparent, in the process testing the limits of senses and using tools to see what unaided eyes cannot.

    Digging for Clues

    The second stage of the plan, Investigate! A See- For-Yourself Exhibit, is also funded in part by a lead grant from the National Science Foundation. This exhibit provides visitors with practice in some of the thought processes involved in carrying out a scientific experiment. Like the best of past exhibits, Investigate!  components are engaging, interesting, and fun to do. They stimulate your curiosity and help you learn something. They are easy to do, not trivial, but designed so that visitors of different ages and abilities will have successful experiences with the exhibit. And, they connect with visitors, tie in with life experiences.
    Beyond these goals of all interactive exhibits, the components of Investigate!  aim at engaging visitors in specific mental activities, focusing on three groups of scientific thinking skills:

  • asking questions;
  • making measurements and collecting data;
  • analyzing data and interpreting results.

    This may sound far too technical for visitors to do in a museum exhibit—but that is where the skill of the exhibit developers and a successful development process come in.
    Working on Seeing the Unseen  gave the staff practice in using formative evaluation as a means of developing exhibits. Using a special area in the Museum, the Test Tube,  we try out exhibit ideas with visitors before we build them into finished exhibits. In this way, we can learn what works and what doesn't work, from the visitor's point of view. We can learn if an activity is engaging or not, and if it is doable and understandable. The prototype exhibit components go through a series of changes, resulting in exhibits that meet challenging educational goals and are also fun for visitors to do.
    A hard-working team of exhibit developers has been prototyping Investigate!  exhibit components for over two years. One of the first components completed was the solar car workshop. In this area, you design your own model solar car. You control critical aspects of the car, like the size of the wheels and the pulley ratio. After you have put your car together, you can test it on the lighted race track. You can experiment with the effects of different factors at nearby exhibits that specifically test wheel size, drive ratio, or solar cell performance. You can try to design a car that meets some of our design challenges, or you can make up your own. And when you're done, you can "publish" your results at a nearby computer terminal, where you can make a computer video explaining what you did, and watch the movies left by others.
    Other Investigate!  activities include experimenting with temperature to find out if Styrofoam cups keep your drink hotter longer, or with skin conductivity to find out if different types of music, or different scents, have a calming or an exciting effect on you. You can test models of different fish to see the effect of their shapes on their swimming abilities, or dig up clues to an ancient mystery in an archaeological dig area—and help the curators interpret the evidence.

    At first you may not even realize that Investigate!  is aimed at practicing your scientific thinking skills. As children, we learn in very much the same way that scientists do: We explore and discover things for ourselves. As we grow up, we tend to learn more and more in authoritarian ways—from books, teachers, experts, and even from exhibits at the Museum of Science.
    We hope that Investigate!  will rekindle the childlike sense of scientific discovery in visitors, and that in this exhibit visitors will find the answers to their own questions. Results depend not upon the authoritative voice of the Museum but upon the questions that visitors ask, the data they collect, and the conclusions that they individually and collectively come to. In fact, visitors will be doing science in this exhibit, not just learning facts—and if the prototype testing is any indication, they'll be having a great time, too.

    Larry Bell is Vice President of the Exhibits Division at the Museum of Science. The article is excerpted from the Museum of Science Magazine, February-March 1996.