Living with Ideas #5

On Tuesday we visited the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum (http://www.aahom.org/). Here are some of my impressions, through three perspectives in educational psychology.

Skinner (Behaviorism)

Several exhibits have relatively long delays between a behavior and a reward. For example, at the hot air balloon exhibit, I have to depress the button for over a minute. To condition visitors to interact with exhibits, feedback should be sooner. Of course, if the exhibit is designed to condition patience, then the eventual reward of the colorful, rising balloon is a good reinforcer.

Most exhibits were visually stimulating, with bright colors and fun shapes. Most exhibits were visually static. More exhibits should be visually changing (e.g., moving parts) to attract interest.

The musical staircase is impossible to avoid. Visitors are reinforced for simply entering the museum.

Vygotsky (Socio-Historic)

Many exhibits use cars as sample contexts, or they explicitly teach automotive technology. This is an effective context for many visitors, because automobile manufacturing is a major local industry. So children may want to know more about cars, to participate more fully in adult culture. Other examples of inviting contexts include the television studio, and relating the bitmap sign to the signs on buses.

It's difficult to make some exhibits work, even as an adult. For example, some exhibits require forcefully cranking a handle. While such exhibits might be poor learning objects for individual children, they foster collaboration between a child and a parent. The parent can encourage the child to set up an experiment (e.g., connect the wires from the generator to the light bulb) and make a prediction, then the parent can crank the handle.

In general, most exhibits seem to have minimal instructional value for solo children. But many exhibits foster a partnership between a parent or older child and a young child. A parent might not have these tools at home, so the museum is a repository for scaffolding through collaboration. I witnessed many parent-child pairs exploring the exhibits together.

Exciting, visually dynamic exhibits foster infectious interest. When one child started interacting with an intriguing exhibit (e.g., the bubble prison), many children were drawn to it.

Information Processing

Many exhibits try to teach basic ideas about digital technology. This is not an easy curriculum to teach (e.g., binary counting). The exhibits try to simplify and magnify key relationships and dynamics to make them easier to understand.

The green screen in the television studio fosters intriguing experiences. Visitors who hide their legs behind a green sheet must reconcile the image on the monitor (of invisible legs) with their still-present legs. This fosters metacognition and hypotheses, to contrast visual information with kinesthetic information.

Many exhibits use lots of text to explain their curriculum. More exhibits should use other media. For example, one physically interactive exhibit was accompanied by a looping video of a child properly interacting with the exhibit.