sethpurcell

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 is being demonstrated by the device, they get to poke at the thing that does it and try to figure out how it works, and that's a lot of fun for a curious kid; there are layers there.

This.

Author here. Thank you for this comment, you make so many great points. I'd like to respond to some of them.

First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."

This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.

You may be right that this is the answer to my unstated question of "Why are these exhibits not in perfect working order?" However, I reject it as an excuse, because, for instance, the building also requires maintenance, and this maintenance is apparently kept up with: it was clean, the doors opened and closed without squeaking, the elevators function.

Both the building and the exhibits are required to serve TFI's mission and need maintenance to perform their functions. If an exhibit is worth conceiving, building, and housing in the museum, it deserves maintenance, just as the museum building does. So I'm inferring that adequate exhibit maintenance is just not being prioritized either in the cash budget or the "volunteer effort budget". Emotionally, it feels terrible to walk my son over to a thing and be excited to show it to him, and have it not work. I'd rather the thing not be there.

We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.

I have no problem with that because it's adding something to the experience of the artifacts on display. My problem is with the exhibit itself being a touchscreen. I would say there is very little point to visiting a museum in this case, because the web can distribute software more cheaply. My complaint is that a touchscreen does not count as being "hands-on", and TFI is all about being hands-on; that's what makes it so special, and to me, wonderful and worth fighting for.

Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.

This, right here, is the rub. Because to my mind there is a fine line between meeting people where they are, and pandering to perceived preferences or limitations of our audience, and in the process, losing sight of the mission.

If we know kids are on screens a lot, or worse, believe that kids "need screens to be engaged", and thus proceed to skew our museum exhibits toward screens, are we doing right by them? I would argue, vociferously, that we are not. When we try to serve everyone, even those with little interest in our mission, by diluting our fidelity to our mission, then we end up serving poorly those who really are interested in our mission. There's probably a term for this phenomenon, but I don't know it.

There's also a fine line between doing what must be done to survive, and bending the mission in the interest of cashflows to the degree the organization is no longer serving its mission. TFI needs cashflow to survive and there are doubtless many ways for it to boost revenue and reduce costs that I would argue go against its mission. I'm arguing that the touchscreen-based exhibits are so far outside its mission that they need to go. The Kinect exhibits are on the edge for me, but I think those can stay.

Author here, thanks for your comment. I'm really sad to hear that everyone was let go; as I said, I loved TFI like nothing else when I was a kid.

I completely understand the incentives re: Body Worlds, Harry Potter (I've even seen an Angry Birds exhibit). But there's a fine line between a non-profit doing what it must to survive, and drifting so far from its mission that it no longer deserves to survive. TFI is still far from that point, but the trajectory is worrisome to me, so I called it out.

Given the sentiment in these comments, I figure this crowd might be interested in the book "Measurement" by Paul Lockhart (the guy who wrote "A Mathematician's Lament")

He's of the opinion that math should be taught not as jumping through hoops for "reasons", but as an art, enjoyable for its own sake, and that this would actually produce more confident and capable thinkers than the current approach. (I think the argument applies to almost all education but his focus is just on math.)

+1 for Gather.town we've been using it for years

Thanks! On-prem deployment is something we've considered, but the increase in complexity rules that out for now.

Thank you! We're aiming to build a "minimally complete" tool, and it's a delicate balancing act.

The app is responsive so you can actually use Flat on mobile, it's just not a great UX IMO. We're planning on building native apps in the future. If you give it a try on mobile we'd love to get your feedback on how to improve that experience.

We agree, there should be an editable grid view, and we're planning on adding that. In the meantime: you can do "quick edits" by hovering over a card and typing 'e' (or shift-click to select multiple cards). Then just type in a label name, a user name, a new title, etc. -- it's very quick. (But we definitely agree on the grid view, and thanks for sharing that feedback.)

Thanks! Yes, our strategy is to integrate the minimally-sufficient set of pieces into one coherent experience, to eliminate exactly that need for jumping around between different apps.