Science Project
After 175 years, the Museum of Science is embarking on a mighty mission: to get schoolchildren excited about engineering and technology, help the US compete in the global economy, and, oh yes, make field trips more fun.
IT'S 9:30 ON A
Hardly.
While the number of school visitors - about 209,000 last year - may stay the same, one of New England's most popular attractions is attempting a dramatic shift that is being watched closely by science museums around the country. As the museum transforms its emphasis, programs, and role in the city and beyond, the place that the parents of these children visited during their long-ago field trips may become as extinct as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, whose skeleton still stands in the Blue Wing.
A hint of what's to come peeks out of a corner near the entrance. Yellow letters spell a question: "Why Technological Literacy?" Four floors above the lobby, in his well-appointed office overlooking the glistening water of the Charles, the museum president and director, Ioannis Miaoulis, answers that question in urgent tones that suggest that the stakes are not the future of the museum but the future of civilization. "We have gone from being a society that makes things to a society that talks about things," he says. "That's because engineering doesn't get the respect it deserves."
Miaoulis means to change that.
ONCE, AMERICANS WHO BUILT THINGS WERE
This attitude has rankled Miaoulis, 44, ever since he came to Boston from Greece in 1980 and was dismayed to find the title of engineer applied to people who collected trash. Today, when Miaoulis looks at the children who visit his museum, he sees far beyond Methuen and Newburyport. He sees all the way to Shanghai - and the fact that in 2000, China, Russia, and Japan graduated more engineers than the United States, according to the National Science Foundation. What's more, in 2001, a majority of US doctoral degrees in engineering went to foreign nationals, according to the same report, published last year. It makes no sense to him that American children - and their teachers - shy away from engineering. "What do kids do in their spare time?" he asks rhetorically. "They build things! The boys build castles, the girls build homes for stuffed animals."
While it's tempting to say that the only thing American kids reliably build these days are their waistlines, that only underscores the need for them to do something more productive. But build bridges or design computers? Americans are happy to play with the finished product after somebody in Bombay figures out how to put the thing together.
Part of the problem might be the words themselves: "Technology" and "engineering" imply complexity, skills beyond normal folks, multiple graduate degrees. The reality is different. Engineering is "problem-solving, essentially," says David Rabkin, 44, the museum's vice president for technologies. "And, ideally, the engineer is going to come up with a solution that others can use to solve the same problem. A technology is a repeatable solution to a problem. So they're related, but different."
When Miaoulis became dean of the Tufts University Engineering School in 1994, he saw that many of his students were dropping out of the major before they completed a single engineering class. The problem, he learned in focus groups with students, was the intimidating math and science prerequisites. So Miaoulis designed and taught a freshman-level engineering class that incorporated one of his hobbies: cooking. "The class was really about heat transfer, an important principle of engineering, but we taught it in a kitchen," he says. "At the end of the class, you could eat the experiment." Enrollment and retention rates rose in the department as Miaoulis encouraged faculty to develop similar classes and the Internet boom spurred interest in engineering programs nationwide. "Students realized that it could be fun," he says, "and that engineering could bring math and science to life."
On January 1, 2003, Miaoulis took his approach to the science museum, which he is determined to lead in a historic new direction. He wants to make the institution - founded in 1830 as the Boston Society of Natural History - a national trend-setter in the effort to increase technological literacy, not only by altering the museum's exhibits and programs, but by becoming an active partner in education. "Our main goal," says Miaoulis, "is to make every kid technologically literate. If we start now in the school system, within 18 years we will have reached every single kid in the United States."
He's on his way. In December 2000, Miaoulis and other educators persuaded the Massachusetts Board of Education to adopt curriculum frameworks for teaching engineering in grades K through 12. "If you had to name the father of technology education in Massachusetts, it would be Ioannis," says David Driscoll, the state's commissioner of education. "He makes things happen." Miaoulis and his allies have created curriculum materials and teacher training programs to support new state education requirements, including technology and engineering components on the MCAS science exam for grades 5 and 8.
The museum works with teachers like Nancy Yocom de Romero, who remembers field trips from Acton to the museum as a highlight of her year. "Maybe I was just one of those science-y kids. I don't know," she says. "But I think the museum gets part of the credit for my interest in the subject."
Now a fourth-grade teacher at Barbieri Elementary School in Framingham, Yocom de Romero does more with the museum than pet the stuffed bear in the New England Habitats exhibit area (nicknamed "Thread-Bear" by one staffer because of a rump rubbed bald by thousands of tiny, stroking hands). Yocom de Romero was one of 10 teachers around the state who helped develop the museum's new curriculum materials, "Engineering is Elementary." Since January 2004, they have fine-tuned the lesson plans, which - like Miaoulis's cooking classes - teach engineering from a student-friendly perspective. So Yocom de Romero's fourth-graders devised solutions for moving potatoes in a fictional potato-chip factory. "I think it does an excellent job of getting away from the misconception that technology is something you plug in or that uses batteries," she says.
"Engineering is Elementary" has now been used by 300 teachers and more than 2,000 students statewide; this year, the program is being introduced in 10 more states. (A similar program for high school classes, "Engineering the Future," is being used in 80 high schools in seven states, including Massachusetts.) "My students really enjoy it," says Yocom de Romero, of the elementary school curriculum. "It allows them to use their creativity and imagination."
WHILE THE CURRICULUM EFFORTS EXPAND QUICKLY, change is slower within the museum, which can still seem fusty to some. "That old-and-stodgy tag is always placed on the museum by people who are really not in the market for what the museum is providing," says Bob Hoffman, president of Gearon Hoffman Advertising, the museum's ad agency. "It's not designed for a 30-year-old guy and his date. It's for families and school groups."
And lots of them. Last year, 1.5 million people visited the museum and its large-screen theater. But attendance has fallen every year since 1998, when 1.9 million visitors came. The September 11 attacks put a dent in tourism, and state budget cuts and high gas prices reduced the number of field trips. Still, the exhibit "Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt" drew 289,000 visitors from November 2002 to March 2003. And in New England, only Fenway Park attracts more paying visitors per year. That happens to be where Chewbacca - actually, exhibit designer Mike Horvath, 28, in a Wookie costume - threw out the opening pitch in the September 28 Red Sox-Blue Jays game to publicize the exhibit "Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination."
The exhibit touts the museum's message that technology can be fun. But after the droids and hovercraft and light-sabers are packed and sent on a national tour in April, how will the museum continue to make technology and engineering as sexy? "The challenge," Hoffman says, "is how to get these tech and engineering ideas into some form that people are intrigued by."
Much of the task falls to David Rabkin. The former software engineer took the newly created job of vice president for technologies in 2000, right after the museum acquired the assets of Boston's shuttered Computer Museum. Star Wars aside, Rabkin says the museum should not be starry-eyed about technology. "I think it's critically important that we do controversy," he says. While he is full of exhibit ideas - including a Fantastic Voyage-style virtual trip through the human body as part of an exhibit on medical imaging - he also envisions the evolving museum as a place not only to look but to talk, a place, perhaps, to bring a date, after all. He would like to see community forums where visitors, community leaders, and scientists discuss controversial issues, such as stem cells; workshops where visitors play the roles of scientists; and mini-lectures where prominent researchers from MIT or Harvard tell ordinary people about their work. "We're imagining a future where we are going to get the public more involved in the process of science and technology," he says.
Other science museums are watching with interest. "The Museum of Science is a leader in this," says Nancy Stueber, president and CEO of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, "and I think there's a great need for what they're doing. We're all increasingly looking at technology to use it as a tool to deliver on our mission, which is to increase public understanding about science."
In October, the National Science Foundation announced that three science museums, including Boston's, would lead a $20 million effort to create exhibits and educational programs about nanotechnology - engineering at the molecular scale - at science museums around the country. While good news for the museum, the nanotechnology initiative suggests how hard it can be to exhibit technology. "How do you show nanotechnology?" asks Hoffman with a chuckle. "It's tiny!" Still, he believes the museum is up to the task.
Today's visitor sees only hints of the exhibits to come; Rabkin says there is no target date for further changes. In the future, visitors might be able to use iPods, PDAs, and other devices to personalize their tours and access more information. Visitors might listen, for example, to a podcast by the founder of a waste-treatment company as they walk through an exhibit on water ecosystems and hear how lessons from those ecosystems are helping to scrub emissions from power plants.
As the museum evolves, Rabkin says, its leaders have "no plan to decrease its life- and natural-science offerings because of new engineering-technology exhibits." He notes that the museum has been working with a Denver-based architecture firm to integrate technology into programs and exhibits, to remove some galleries, and to use space efficiently.
So, the face of the museum's future may not be the intense mien of Miaoulis but the plastic snout of AIBO - the robot dog manufactured by
Within minutes of stampeding into the museum that Tuesday morning, dozens of children have found the AI-pooch in his "pen." Using sensors and software to recognize sights and sounds, AIBO functions uncannily like a real canine. He walks, sees faces, responds to his name, and rolls over. "How do you know he's happy?" one little girl asks, as others call his name. "Guess!" replies museum staffer Tuan Pham, 25, AIBO's "master." And with that, AIBO's luminescent tail begins to wag. The children squeal with glee, and the Museum of Science seems to be conjuring up the same magic as it did in the days when visitors just wanted to pet Thread-Bear.
John Hanc teaches journalism and writing at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York, and is finishing his sixth book, Racing For Recovery: Addict to Ironman, to be published in April. E-mail comments to magazine@globe.com. 