Interactive Computer Exhibits For Ages 3-8?

Johnny Mnemonic writes "My company has the opportunity to contribute to a children's museum in our area. We are a technology company, so I'd like the exhibit to be computer/networking related, and to raise the awareness and understanding of how the Internet, networking, and computers work. However, children's museums cater to a pretty young age group, 3-8 years old, so the the exhibit needs to be highly interactive, durable, tactile, and yet instructive of the concepts. Google fails to turn up any turn-key options, and, although the concepts are computer related, a computer-based exhibit tends to be too fragile and susceptible to withstand the rigors of 250 preschoolers/day. How would you design a display that meets these requirements and is still fun and educational?"

Comments

Exhibit idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume that the exhibit will be American, so:

• Put an Xbox360 or PS3 with two controllers connected to a plasma tv in the middle of a pen, then release groups into it and watch them all fight each other over who gets to play.
• Let them try to operate a PC with Linux installed. The first three who don't cry win ribbons.
• Let them sit in a 3ftx3ft cubicle while their parents say within earshot, "The Indian kids are so much cheaper than our kids...maybe we should trade!"
• Leashing their necks to the rear bumper of a car 5 at a time and then driving the car around the block a few times at 3 MpH, for a little exercise.
• Bust the kids for child porn when it's discovered that there are pics of them nude in the bathtub.

iPhone/iTouch

[^switch]

Stick a bunch of tied-down iTouch there. I say this only half jokingly, because my two year old finds them extremely intuitive and interactive. She unlocks it, watches videos, plays her games just by recognising the icons and the buttons with their visible gestures. Because of these features, this is the first phone I've owned that hasn't been thrown, drowned or buried by her.

Physical logic gates?

[TimTucker]

Going to more fundamental principles, could you have a display centered around boolean logic with mechanical gates? I recall having seen Lego-based logic gates in the past that could probably be scaled up in size and built out of more durable materials.

Re:Physical logic gates?

[FlyByPC]

This sounds like a good idea -- show them how computer fundamentals work. Use some nice, durable switches and pretty lights to make some demo AND, OR, NOT gates etc. Maybe even an XOR, a flip-flop, etc. Show them how all the pieces come together -- maybe put a Z80 or something under a fixed microscope to show them how complex they are.

Re:Physical logic gates?

[kpesler]

Along these lines, I recall an earlier Slashdot story about using water to create logic gates. If these were scaled up to make them more visible to the kids, and made interactive, it could make for an engaging exhibit. As a father of two little boys, I know that kids love to play with water.

Packet Data

[TrippTDF]

Here's one that would work on kids that young: Turn them into "packets" and have them travel through an open-ended maze in their effort to get to their desination.

Create an inter-connected maze that has no single entrence and exit, but a bunch of ways in and out. Each point is marked as a different city across the world. Let's say a kid enters in "Japan" and a computer screen tells him he needs to get to "New York". He then walks through the maze, where there are a series of hubs where he has to ask another terminal what direction he has to go in next.

It would be highly physical and an easy way to introduce kids to the simplest building blocks of the internet... you could even build it as a "series of tubes" :)

I really hope you see this one to the end- please submit the end results to slashdot. Good luck!

Re:Packet Data

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck explaining packets loss to the parents.

Re:Packet Data

[rainmaestro]

I like this idea.

Where I grew up, we had a children's science museum (Great Explorations: http://www.greatex.org/index.php ) that I used to visit during summers (they did 1-2 week summer camps). The most popular exhibit (most of them were rotated in and out) was always the Touch Tunnel. Totally dark inside, with corridors, ramps, etc. You had to feel your way through to the end. Kids loved it, even when the lights were on. The idea was really simple: giving kids the experience of relying on something other than their sight, and it was really effective.

It is great to see the author's company contributing to a kid's museum. I still remember some of the things I learned at those summer camps (like the letters of the alphabet in ASL). I always loved learning, but it was those camps that really sparked my interest in the sciences.

I took my adopted sisters there once a few years ago (they were adopted at 5/6 years of age when I was 19). I think I had more fun with the exhibits than they did *grin*

electrons and gates (balls and wooden toggles

[seifried]

Imagine a vertical board with channels in it, these channels go to wooden gates (think mini teeter-totter), a ball might close a gate and rest there until another ball hits that gate and opens it (or possibly sends the ball in a different direction/etc.). Kids can experiment with setting the gates (positioning them A/B) and then hitting a button to engage the engine which drops balls through 9screw drive/bucket belt, whatever). An Example of an adding machine:

Binary marble adding machine - http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/

Unfortunately I can't find an example online but I think you get the gist of it

packet routing

[MagicM]

A local children's museum has an exhibit that shows how "email is sent through the internet". It uses a pneumatic tube system to shoot wooden balls from a sender through a series of clear tubes to a receiver. The balls go through various T-junctions, which makes the actual route taken "random", and these junctions are labeled with city names. Balls are released at such an interval that regardless of the route, they still arrive in the same order they were sent. A combination of black and white balls allows the recipient to verify the sender's message. There's even a little ascii-type chart to map color combinations to characters.

When my 4-year old saw and heard balls being shot around the wall-o-tubes, she said it was "the coolest thing she'd ever seen." We spent a good half hour feeding the machine.

(I don't know if copying someone else's museum exhibit would be legal, IANAL.)

Re:packet routing

[holeinone]

There is a very nice exhibit like this at The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. White and black billiard balls are used. The first 8 balls are the address (to different stations around the room), the next 8 balls are the character you want to send. A kid arranges the balls in one of the sending stations and then releases them into the internet. The balls flow through several 'routers' (contraptions that look like they are based on old telephone technology). The balls flow to the destination (to which the kid has run over to and is waiting for his balls to arrive) and then the character is displayed. My 6 year old played this for a long time and would have played it all day.

There is a picture here at the bottom of the page. There is also contact information. I'm sure you could get a detailed description of its construction if you wrote them an email.

Good luck!

Re:Anonymous Coward

[supernova_hq]

totally unbreakable.

famous last words

Why Us?

[DynaSoar]

Johnny Mnemonic (176043) writes: "My company has the opportunity to contribute to a children's museum in our area."

Well there Just Johnny, why Ask Slashdot when you've got experts at making kid-proof displays right there? They're the same people to ask just what kind of exhibit they'd like to have. What's the point of a computer/network oriented display? At the ages stated, there's not much to interest them. If it's not an outright concrete example, it's not going to do anything for them because it'll be an abstraction and kids that age don't cross levels of abstraction well if at all. They only reason to have a display based on what your company does is the PR for donating a display. The kids aren't the target for the PR so this is lost on them, and the parents or teachers could get the same PR input from a sign with your company's name. Go that way, and you can give the museum any sort of display they need. Might as well let the museum have the say. After all, at 3 to 8, how are you even going to get the instructions into their heads?

CS Unplugged

[gregbaker]

I'm a big fan of CS Unplugged. It's generally aimed at a slightly older age range, I think, but you can probably adapt some of their demos quite easily.

Hands-On Items I've incorporated into my class

[ideonexus]

1. An 11 centimeter strip of phone or Ethernet wire, which represents one nanosecond of network travel time. RDM Grace Hopper used to use this to explain to the Generals why transmissions around the world took so long. Put a thousand of these together to create a microsecond.
2. History of computers: Put out an abacus, slide ruler, and scientific calculator for the kids to play with. Show them a photo of ENIAC and explain how their cell phone now has more computing power.
3. Don't be afraid to put computers out for the kids to play with. I maintain the computers at our local science center, and they do take some abuse, but we haven't lost one in three years of being in use. These are desktops though, with the CPU out of reach. My experience with laptops is that the kids will pull the keys off the keyboard or stick paperclips into the ports (We had an OLPC that got trashed quick when one child ripped the rubber keys off the keyboard). Don't put too much filtering on the computer, you want to keep the kids from looking at porn and installing malware, but you also don't want to keep them from exploring.
4. With computers out, you can have all sorts of activities, such as an Internet scavenger hunt. We did this last night and the kids absolutely loved it. There's also websites where you can perform visual traceroutes. I had our kids run a tracert to fbi.gov, which they got a kick out of.
5. There's the classic "bubblesort" game. Have the kids line up, assign them random numbers. Then have one child be the pointer, another the compare function, etc, etc, and sort the kids into order. It's nice to have psuedocode up on a projector to walk through as they perform the steps.

This is all I can think of right now, but I'll check my notes tonight to remember what else we've done. Good Luck!