Translator: Brian Pikaard Reviewer: Yulia Kallistratova
I am a project coordinator at the Experimentanium museum,
and I would like to tell you a little
about our museum and the emergence of the idea behind it.
The museum opened less than two years ago,
and when we had the idea of creating an interactive museum,
we first looked at how the museums
functioned in the Moscow reality.
Hence, we faced certain problems.
The first problem standing out at the time
was the low attendance rate of museums.
Of course, we could discuss the causes thereof for a long time.
But the fact remains:
in the 90's, the museum attendance rate in Moscow dropped sharply.
And since we are an interactive museum
featuring technologies and natural sciences,
another problem for us was that high school graduates
rarely choose
these specialties and areas as their profession.
Basically, schoolchildren consider
such academic disciplines as biology, physics, and chemistry
to be very complicated, very serious and rather boring.
So, since such stereotype existed, we needed to break it somehow.
We needed to guide our children, our students towards a new direction.
One of the obstacles we saw was a certain satiety of the Moscow public.
We are noticing in the whole socio-cultural infrastructure now
the same concept - people demanding bread and entertainment -
only the demands have increased.
There is a very large number of entertainment and recreation centers.
Also, if 20–30 years ago
there was an information deficit, it's the opposite now.
I really liked the notion of an informational web.
To the schoolchildren who fall into that informational web,
it seems complicated, addictive,
and depending on the amount of sources of information at any given moment,
it often becomes too complicated to orient themselves,
like being in open waters.
We relied on the experience of foreign museums.
In Europe and America
there are interactive museums,
such as the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
or the Experimentarium in Copenhagen,
which successfully combine the functions of a museum, an entertainment center,
and an educational establishment
offering its own activities, workshops, courses, and so on.
In fact, many people think this trend came to us from the West.
Yet, even in 1935 in Leningrad
Yakov Isidorovich Perelman - many of us know his books -
created the House of Entertaining Science on the Fontanka River.
Unfortunately, in the besieged Leningrad in 1942 the house was destroyed.
Its restoration was out of question,
and the idea itself, though it hasn't fallen into oblivion,
got put off for long.
Having decided to follow closely Perelman's example,
we witnessed something absolutely unexpected.
Attendance rate in our museum by schoolchildren is increasing,
attendance rate by university students is increasing, too.
We made a small miscalculation.
We thought of creating a family museum for schoolchildren,
targeting children in the first place.
The experience proved us wrong.
Adults who come into this environment, come in contact with this atmosphere
and feel like children, and they begin to play,
to have fun, and all of this within the space of the museum.
How did we manage to achieve such a symbiosis, and is it worth it?
What does it include?
A museum implies a permanent, yet systematically updated,
systematically changing exhibition.
This is important.
Therefore all the exhibits here at our museum -
our motto is, "You may touch!" -
so all the exhibits should be touched and experimented with.
If we look at the museum by night,
when there are no lights or visitors,
one could hardly call our exhibits an exhibition.
They're more like a pile of some tools.
An exhibit achieves its mission, fulfils its mission
only when someone is standing next to it.
And precisely at that moment something happens
that we could call a point of wonder.
I'm not making myself clear, am I?
A child's point of wonder is very easy to understand.
Take, for example, a three year old
out onto the street after rain
and show him puddles on asphalt.
And half an hour later show him that all the puddles are gone.
There it is: the point of wonder which triggers curiosity.
What has happened? What is going on? Why does this occur?
That's how an interest in science develops.
It is precisely this very moment of surprise that triggers the interest.
The format of an interactive museum, strangely enough,
in my opinion, turned out to be fitting well in the Moscow reality.
And now we are witnessing a wonderful change
as the Polytechnical Museum, the Timiryazev Museum, the Darwin Museum
are all expanding functionalities that they offer to children.
For example, at the Festival of Science we see an enormous flow of people
wishing to be introduced to science and to everything related to it.
I believe that the mission of the science popularization
should be our first priority.
While the mission of information transfer should probably be secondary.
If a person's interest is stirred,
it is within our capacity to find out and learn everything about it.
And there is no limit to personal development if one is interested.
Now I would like to show you a little experiment.
The thing is, since our museum mostly focuses on developments
in fields like physics, chemistry, and biology,
there is something I've learned for myself as well.
Thank you very much.
In physics, there's a simple idea
that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It means, if a very strict teacher
pushes a student ahead forcefully,
that student pushes back with the equal force.
So we don't allow such a direct impact.
Our goal is to get people interested.
Now, as for the chemistry,
I remember little, just something about transforming one substance into another
by combining one with the other.
Well, as I said, by analogy, we have this museum space,
this exhibition, permanent rarely changing systemic exhibition.
And there are two components: one is the educational part,
without which nothing can happen
as it is the very bread a person needs for personal development,
and the entertainment that awakens an interest in the activity itself.
But what are we getting? A qualitatively new product.
A qualitatively new product that adds bright colors to our lives
and motivates kids to grow, to develop;
to develop themselves and to develop the science,
to develop the space we are living in.
Thank you very much for your attention.
(Applause)