301–310 of 404 posts
One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.
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My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard throug…
When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until…
It happens when you give a contract to someone to modernize the place. They throw a bunch of screens and meaningless sculptures (aka artwork), wierd-shaped structures, with random text in large font, around and fulfill the metrics for modern-ness. They just deliver on their customer's wish to see things to be quite different from earlier state. How that difference makes sense, doesn't matter. Delivery done, transaction completed.
We are chasing change. Change is seen as accomplishment. Big bosses keep shuffling their org very often. Not really to optimize, but to show that they did something, and to show their power. Weirdness also qualifies as a good thing, because it is a change. No wonder TV ads and content promote as much weirdness as allowed.
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> the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days. I think, if you went back to the origin of the term "AI" and tried to teach an introduction to the very fundamentals, this could actually be a fun and inspiring class - one that might not…
Another funny option could be to have the AI class be a linear algebra class.
One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.
Nothing about a science museum filled with kids precludes you from playing with the exhibits yourself.
So in theory you are right, in practice there is a lot of social pressure to bear to do it.
The best is if you can go in outside peak hours (take day off work etc).
It's rampant in art museums as well. It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand... Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.
It costs $2000? Why?
No museum is framing 2000 arts/year. If they did, then it'll probably come down to more reasonable hourly rates + costs of materials.
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Silly aside: "digital art" is the means by which you legally "buy" weed in DC. You pay for the "art" and they "gift" you a box of special brownies or a joint.
Whoa I had not heard this. I'm really surprised that holds up legally.
Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day. They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in comba…
THANK YOU for fighting this fight. I hope the responses here might add some empirical weight to your arguments — some people apparently do care about this. And I believe you on how hard the reliability/durability challenges must be in engineering these things — I've seen what the kids do to them. BTW, I think the mechanisms themselves are no small part of the interest; kids don't just get to see whatever phenomenon i…
I believe it's actually easier to cope with what kids will do (banging it, trying every nook out etc), compared to many adults putting more force than needed on common mechanism or button or whatever as they figure it out.
But ultimately, it's about wear and tear.
It holds up.
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Silly aside: "digital art" is the means by which you legally "buy" weed in DC. You pay for the "art" and they "gift" you a box of special brownies or a joint.
Whoa I had not heard this. I'm really surprised that holds up legally.