Kids Don’t Need a New Science Center to See Thought-Provoking Exhibits
Regarding “The Curious Society” (Currents, Dec. 10): Joe O’Connell and the folks at Creative Machines are fantastic. Their interactive exhibits are imaginative, engaging and high-quality. The Tucson Children’s Museum is proud to call Joe our friend, supporter and consultant. Any venture that allows kids to explore science in a fun way deserves consideration and would be a nice addition to what the Tucson Children’s Museum offers.
While many of Joe and company’s creations end up in far-flung places, you don’t have to wait for a new science center to enjoy them. The Children’s Museum is home to some of Joe’s newest stuff. We have recently installed a super-interactive beat sequencer in our music room. The beat sequencer allows kids to create and manipulate sounds and beats as they compose their own unique brand of music.
In 2010, we will be working with Creative Machines as the Tucson Children’s Museum develops an entirely new set of experiences that focus on kids, technology, play and education. And we hope to continue to partner with Joe and other local supporters to keep the Tucson Children’s Museum a top family attraction.
The museum provides a wonderful place for kids and their families to explore, learn and play together. The museum will welcome its 100,000 annual visitor later this month. That is an attendance record, and one that we are very proud of. The museum has seen double-digit attendance growth every year for the past five years. We have an array of exhibits and experiences to engage kids, and we are proud of our success in downtown Tucson.
You don’t have to go to Hawaii or Berlin—or wait for a new venue—to explore science and engage imaginations with kids. Come on down to the Tucson Children’s Museum. Amazing stuff is happening inside.
Dev K. Sethi
President, Tucson Children’s Museum Board of Directors
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2009.
Kids Need Every Opportunity to Understand Science
I endorse Mr. Sethi’s assertion that you don’t have to go to Hawaii or Berlin to be inspired by science. The Children’s Museum is indeed a wonderful place, and its 100,000 annual visitors are a testament to its success. But science is everywhere, and science centers should be everywhere, too.
An initiative called Community Science Workshops, founded by Dan Sudran in San Francisco, and well funded by the National Science Foundation, began as a grass-roots operation in his garage. When neighborhood children peeked in to see him tinkering, and were excited by what they saw, Sudran realized the power of enthusiasm and the need for kids to have greater and more varied exposure to science. By opening up his garage and sharing his fascination with how things work, he changed the direction of how these kids learned.
http://cbs5.com/video/?id=48308@kpix.daypo…
Sudran also came to understand that true science is a process, not a product, and that a worm or a lawnmower or a rainbow can be the most wonderful “exhibit” of all. The process of science invites observation, speculation, experimentation, mistakes, analysis, and conclusions; and it is, perhaps, best achieved without awareness of the steps along the way.
There are so many compelling arguments for broader science education and Community Science Workshops (more jobs, greater strength in the global economy, new opportunities for kids who don’t fit well into a school setting, and perhaps the strongest – community building from the ground up) that it’s hard to imagine that CSWs would not contribute significantly to the fabric of Tucson.
At at time when the world is confronted by the potentially irreversible threat of global warming, a time when we and our children have to decide how to convert our power infrastructure from one of profligate pollution to one of benign ingenuity, it seems self-evident that the more exposure to science we can get, the better off we, and the world, will be.
Since the Physics Factory’s inception, we have enjoyed a successful relationship with the TCM. We look forward to continued collaboration as our new center develops. Let’s make Tucson the 13th city to offer CSWs to its children.
Thanks,
John Perkins
The Physics Factory
For More on Community Science Workshops:
http://www.inverness-research.org/csw/repo…
This is a quotation from the link above:
Community Science Workshops are community-based non-profit programs that offer underserved youth living in low-income, high-minority neighborhoods a fun and safe way to explore their world through science. Developed over the past 14 years, CSWs now operate in 12 cities throughout the nation—six main CSWs in California with numerous satellite sites, and sites in six cities across the country.
Neither school nor science museum, the CSWs are an unusual kind of institution. They are part science center, part wood shop, part nature center—all in the heart of urban neighborhoods. Located in community centers and schools, they attract youth from local neighborhoods who drop in after school and on weekends.