French have a weird passion for screens in museums.

However, the reason why your son wants to go is that they want to push buttons. And those buttons have to do things. Let a pack of children loose in a childrens' museum, and what do they? Do they run from button to button to button, pushing them, often not even waiting to see the effect.

I don't see anything intrinsically worse about having a bunch of screens do the doing rather than a handful of mechanical thingamajig that would have done the doing in the previous generation of museums. What matters is the experience.

And maybe (just a suggestion), if that's not what you want, don't take them to a science museum.

Might I suggest, a natural history museum instead, where they can personally experience row upon row of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals collected in the 1860s, or entire rooms full of glass cases containing "minerals" (which seemed to me, as a child, to be nothing more than a fancy word for "rock").

Personally, I have great sympathy for science museums, most of which came to be in the 1970s, back when "multimedia" was something powerfully unique and special, and have since had real challenges re-inventing themselves in a world where "multimedia" is about as impressive as a toaster. (Yes, I mean you, Ontario Science Center).

And great admiration for those curators who work hard to successfully re-invent museums in the 21st century. And respect for those curators who conduct brave experiments that sometimes fall short of expectations.

I, personally, love the Royal Ontario Museum, which managed to transform its shelves full of rocks into a curated multimedia "experience" that walks children through the geological history of the planet earth using lots of buttons to push (almost all of which control screens), and an "elevator" that "descends" 600 feet underground into the heart of a mine. And this, children, is what granite looks like! Whumpf. 4 ton granite boulder!! And I'm pretty sure that was even a shelf with a leftover hunk of carbonaceous deoderantite in there somewhere, although I am uncertain on that particular point, because I was distracted by the pure genius of a museum display consisting of a 4 ton granite boulder that children could climb on. All performed while completely resisting the urge to re-invent their "Room full of Dinosaur Bones as a Temple to Science" experience. A first-class museum experience that has withstood the test of time. And they even managed to a preserve a hall full of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals, which serve as a reminder to visitors that museums are constantly evolving things. A display that has a button and a screen that explains that the museum has multiple warehouses full of lumpen stuffed mammals all collected in the 1860s, all of which have to be meticulously conserved for generations of future scientists despite the 1860s awfulness of it all, and that this diorama of a stuffed caribou surrounded by a snarling pack of stuffed wolves, as stuffed groundhogs look on is a vision of what a museum should be that was enormously successful in its time.

I used to love visiting museums to press buttons and turn dials as a kid. That's the funnest part. Anything in a museum that's just a screen is usually dumb.

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the exploratorium in san francisco has also been dumbed down.

the old palace of fine arts exploratorium had a working TESLA COIL !

The gamification of an entire industry. Call me Boomer, but i'm into nice handcrafted, oldschool museums with as little interactive and other electronic media as possible.