Rapid Fire Discovery

My current assignment is to watch children at play. Oddly, this is proving difficult.

 

I don’t have a professional access point at the moment . If I did have a job involving children’s play, I doubt I would have the time to watch them or the leeway to do practice Playwork (what is that?). I don’t want to look like a stalker by simply going down to the park and watching random children. I thought MOSI (Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry) might offer a cover–“let’s enjoy the museum (and watch children play while we’re at it).”

Children’s play comes with its own vocabulary. For example, as the subconscious urge to play becomes a conscious reality this is called the metalude. The play frame is the space (tangible and not so tangible) in which the play takes place. Play flow is the agreed upon play. Annihilation is the end of the play.

On the way to the Museum, I thinking about the pinball movements of children when they are in a cool place with lots of cool things to do. “Rapid Fire Discovery” we could call it, though it can also be called “cognitive mapping” or simply the getting oriented phase. What tends to happen at a museum is that children are introduced to one area of the museum and they go forth and discover–typically at a very rapid or even frantic pace, getting hot and sweaty as the run here and there checking everything out. This phase typically lasts about 20-30 minutes. The more novel the place is, the longer the orientation phase. The more frequent the experience, the less novel and less time is needed for cognitive mapping and the less rapid fire the discovery. Adults also do cognitive mapping, for some of us this process looks just as frantic as a child’s, for others it is much less frantic due to social maturity and that we have most likely been to these types of places before even if it was not this very museum.

So we put the child in the first exhibit hall of the museum… pinball. After about 30 minutes, the chaperone/teacher/parent, takes the group to another exhibit and the process starts all over again. If that Rapid Fire Discovery time is allowed to move through to the next step, children will settle on what they want to do and get into the play flow and into deep play.

Due to renovation projects, only a few exhibits were open at MOSI: one was the standard exhibit about the human body and another was a banquet hall turned Summer Olympics venue. In the human body exhibit, the pinball effect was in full swing. Thankfully it was a slow day, there were not hoards of children but the children I did see ran from exhibit to exhibit barely taking a moment to check out what the information was about. If the button didn’t do something amazing in 2 seconds–off they went to the next thing.

The Summer Olympics room had a different pace. Even though the room was just as busy with stuff to do, the materials wasn’t as novel. There was a space for a foot race, basketball hoops game like you’d see at an arcade, table tennis, floor mats for gymnastics. You would think that the frenzy would have been even more, but it was not, perhaps the materials were not novel so the visitors knew how to interact with the materials and thus were able to sort out what to do in a shorter time frame. Or perhaps because the room was totally open, the cognitive mapping could be done with a sweep of the eyes. But mostly likely a mix of the two. Yet in the brain game area the same rapid fire discovery took place–many more games and new games around every corner. Like water going through a channel, a wide open straight channel slows the water down, a winding and turning channel speeds the water up.

not so calm

calm

As I shot hoops at the basketball exhibit, a boy complained to me that the scoring lights were not working. I said, “I think I will be able remember how many shots I make, considering that I’ve missed every shot so far.” A young worker troubleshooting the machine reiterated the assessment of the equipment, “Yeah, buddy, you will just have to count.” Disappointed in the equipment, the boy wandered off. Disappointed in my lack of success, so did I.