Rather than take the shortest and most direct route home from Honolulu, Glen wanted to spend some time in San Francisco so we flew from Honolulu to San Francisco and had a few hours to kill. We caught the BART into town (I couldn’t stop shouting ‘Bart!’ a la Homer Simpson every time it was said over the PA. Small things.) and then I went to the Exploratorium in the Embarcadero.

It was a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco, not a bit of fog about. The reason why I wanted to go to the Exploratorium was because back home I’m working on an energy/electricity exhibition/museum/experience/bit of hell and thought it would be good to check out the competition.

The Exploratorium was established by Oppenheimer (yep, the Manhattan Project guy) who wanted kids to have a hands-on experience of science. It was most definitely hands-on and it most definitely had children. I’d say it met its objectives.

There were mostly single-user interactive exhibits throughout, divided into topics, so I spent most of my time taking photos of magnets, generators and circuit boards. (Definitely felt uncomfortable being a single adult male taking photos in a place dominated with children.) The signs for each had a ‘how to use it’ and ‘why it does what it does’ explanation, but as far as overall interpretive signage for the topics, it didn’t have any.

There were children running around everywhere, making the things do the things, much like Scitech back home. I don’t know about the ‘educational’ value, whether they actually learned anything about the concepts behind the experiments but they looked like they were having fun. The temporary exhibits (school holiday programs) were the most frequented, with enough exhibits for there not to be too much of a crowd around a particular one. In fact, a lot didn’t have anyone using them.

One thing that struck me later as I was going over the visit was that as most of the exhibits were single-user you had one of two unfortunate side effects. The first was that if the person using the exhibit feels like there are others waiting behind them, they’d been inclined to rush their experience and perhaps not do it again and get a fuller understanding. Alternatively, if the person using the exhibit is taking forever, the person waiting behind might get impatient and wander off and not come back. I’m not sure whether it’s a problem but it did strike me that the whole place felt a bit rushed, that kids were jumping from one machine to the next. At least they were having fun. I’d like to see their market research and studies.

After a while, I’d seen what I wanted to, took a bunch of photos and then wandered back to meet Glen and take the BART back to the airport. We got through security (my backpack taken aside for special screening) and then went to the United Polaris lounge for a wonderful shower and lots of food. It was one of the nicer lounges we’ve been to. Then we boarded our 12-hour-plus flight to Auckland.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk8Rvfjgdk7/?taken-by=tygerflaem