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.

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.

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!