Technology In Motion

Yesterday (April 25, 2014) I went with a group of friends to the "Perot Museum of Nature and Science" (http://www.perotmuseum.org/) for a day of "active" education.  We were there on a school day so that allowed us to have 1300 (+/- a few thousand) elementary school children as our co-guests at the museum. This led to a great deal of people watching, as well as looking at and playing with the exhibits ourselves. One of the great things about this museum is that it is not just a museum - i.e. while it houses artifacts in the exhibits, it also allows you to play and interact with the exhibits and concepts of the exhibits.

One of the exhibits had a mechanical arm.  You sat down at the table and touched the governing electrodes to your own arm and tried to control the mechanical hand through flexing your own muscles.  I found this exceptionally difficult, and felt somewhat handicapped that it did not read my flexing motions the way I wanted it to.  I had to watch what the hand did and adapt my flexing to get the correct result of an opening and closing of the hand.

In another section there was a room where you could make music.  Set of drums, piano, synthesizer to record...  A grandpa came in with his wife and grand-daughter.  He immediately started playing the piano (boy could he play) and the wife was trying to show the grand-daughter how to keep tempo with him on the drums.  Their love and comfort-ability with music, and desire to have her feel the same - and just play with it... well it was really awesome to see...  The look of joy on her face once she caught on to the drums, just for a few beats, was radiant.

At one point, when we were in the Dinosaur exhibit, our eyes fell on a young girl that was perhaps 7 or 8 years old.  She was trying to pick out a stuffed Dinosaur, as any small child would want to do.  But this young girl made us all, frankly, stare.  She had two artificial legs, the new high tech ones that bend at the ankles and knees, similar to the one shown on the left here. My brain flashed back to the mechanical arm exhibit I had just played with.  How hard that must be to get TWO different limbs to work so flawlessly I thought to myself.  I think when she stood on her tip toes to look at something, several of our hearts nearly melted to the ground. We could not take our eyes off of her.

We had been surrounded with amazing technology all day... so why did this singular display touch us all so? For me, it was because you realize that all of this science has some very practical results.  You realize that it is not all about just sitting in labs and tinkering with mechanics, etc... but that many times the exploration results in the changing of lives.  Lives that would be quite different had the use of a particular set of technologies not been set in motion.

Of the hundreds of things we looked at and experienced, it is these two moments (well three as we must include playing the life game with my friends - we were such juveniles for a moment in time) that will remain in my memory and stand out when I think of this museum; the strength of one small girl whose life was enhanced by technology, and the smile of another whose life was touched by the joy of music.