>Date:    Tue, 10 Aug 2004 07:46:22 -0700
>From:    Deb Fuller <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Object Lessons
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

>>  When my daughter was in Scouts, and I the Scout
>>  leader, my team and I took the girls to Marineland to
>>  see the sea animals, shows, and exhibits.  While they
>>  appreciated what they saw, what they really liked most
>>  of all were the new video game machines.  They would
>>  rather see the lights, bells, and whistles of Donkey
>>  Kong and Ms. Pac Man than the things we actually
>>  brought them to see.

>Yeah, that's really sad, but I think it's also in a product of how children
>were raised. If parents set a limit on video games and take their kids out to
>museums or the zoo more often than their once-a-year school
>field-trip, I think
>that kids would be more into animals than video games.

I have to offer a counterexample, Deb. My 2 kids are 8 and 5. I limit
TV. I limit computer games. We have no game system. They go to
museums quite regularly. They are inexorably drawn to any video or
computer interactive in a museum: they will plunk down and watch a
film, they will go directly to a computer and just glance at other
stuff. At the Franklin Institute Air Show exhibit I had to drag them
away from the Wright Kite interactive which had a huge projection
screen.

The ANS had only films in their auditorium and the dinosaur
blue-screen interactive: otherwise there were no video-based
interactives that my kids latched onto. For this I am glad. And there
was absolutely no video screen stuff at the Please Touch Museum. And
which museums did they like best in retrospect? Academy of Natural
Sciences and Please Touch.

Also, very often tiredness is a factor in my kids wanting to zone:
they were tired the day we went to Mystic. The Air Show exhibit was
one of the last we saw that day.

As already pointed out, there are good interactives and there are bad
interactives, just as there are good object displays and there are
bad ones.

---Amy

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