I visited Inventure Place at a special pre-opening open house at the end of
June. The interactive exhibits are fun to play with, but I'm not sure that I
or anyone else is learning a lot--at least I felt that the intellectual
context for learning is stronger at the Exploratorium in SF than in Akron.
Great fun, though, and I'm sure that visitors will be drawn back.

The Inventors Hall of Fame portion, on four or five balconies overlooking the
interative floor, is very traditional and boring. Too bad. Here are the
histories of very, very creative individuals and the exhibit techniques are
25 years out-of-date. AND the worst part is that these exhibits are not
connected to the great interactive exhibits below that demonstrate the
underlying principles and concepts. So you have a panel on Thomas Edison on
the balcony, but when you're down on the interactive floor playing with
persistance of vision you're NOT connected back to Edison's invention of
motion pictures.

I suspect that school classes visiting Inventure Place will have a ball
experimenting on the lower floor, but totally ignore the balcony exhibits.
Lost opportunity to make history interactive and exciting and to place
invention and creativity in a cultural/artistic context.

The interactive exhibits, though once again, are done very well. Wonder how
they will hold up to several or more thousands of school kids?  Even at the
pre-opening, some were showing wear.....

Ed Pershey
Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland
formerly, Director, Tsongas Industrial History Center, Lowell, MA