After many requests and a nearly equal number of wholly intentional delays, I finally took my children to the Bob The Builder traveling exhibit at the COSI Columbus museum. What a waste of time that was. The “exhibit” consisted of little more than promotion of the Bob The Builder television series, a mere handful of buttons to press, and some oversized legos in small numbers borrowed from a larger toddler exhibit elsewhere in the same building.
Why, look, a big model of a trailer with a small space inside you can step into and do nothing with. Why, look, the Wendy character stands there, also doing nothing at all. The only interactive feature with the trailer was that you could flip a switch to have lights shine on pretend solar panels to “show” them pretending to collect light energy. Then, after a delay of a second or two, a light bulb on the trailer would switch on. See, kids? You just “learned” about solar energy! Well, no, not at all, actually. But you did let some salesman hawking this exhibit put checkmarks next to “environment” and “alternative energy” on some impressive-looking pedagogical list. You know, the sort they have in kids’ catalogues, where they’re selling a pebble for $14.95 using the text, “teach your child scientific principles of force, momentum and friction in a variety of scientific experiments endorsed by physics instructors at Harvard University!”
Here’s the Dizzy character, some kind of cement mixer I think. You could use a cement mixer to demonstrate principles of rotation, to show how small bits of things mix with big bits of things, to let children experiment with different mixtures of bits of different size to get different outcomes… all sorts of actual sciency stuff like that. But no, this Dizzy character doesn’t do anything like that. It actually doesn’t do anything. There’s a button you can press on it, and a speaker inside Dizzy utters a sentence along the lines of “Wuh huh hoo, kids, I’m Dizzy, wuh hoo!” That’s it. See the wheels on the bottom? They don’t roll. See the wheel on the back? It’s locked so kids won’t mess with it and actually do things. And up top there’s some “cement” which is really all molded plastic, stuck together, immobile and inert.
Here’s another Bob the Builder statue, made out of that semi-soft, sort-of-plastic material you can find at indoor playgrounds in malls lately. But in the malls, you can climb on the statues. Here there’s a sign that says, “leave the driving to Bob!” No climbing on this statue. What do you do with it? Again, nothing, except pushing a button to get a little saying out of a speaker. None of the parts move. None of the parts demonstrate anything. The statue just sits there.
Oh, lookee, kids! A place for you to sit down and… watch an episode of Bob the Builder on TV!
The Bob the Builder exhibit is making the rounds of science museums as an exhibit, but it is not about science and it’s not even an exhibit, really. It’s an walk-in advertisement for Bob the Builder television and associated products, with a couple of buttons to press and a few Lego blocks to play with. This sort of thing belongs in a shopping mall, not a science museum. So why is it in a science museum like COSI? Well, I suspect it works for COSI by bringing in kids who see posters for the affair and, expecting something cool and impressive, pester their parents into bringing them there. Attendance goes up, woo hah, woo hah, and it doesn’t really matter if the exhibit itself is any good once the parents and their kids are there, because they’ve already paid for parking, then for admissions, and hey, you pass by the food court on the way to see it all, and then by the gift shop on the way out…
Yes, the whole thing works for museums like COSI, even if the contents are mediocre, unless word spreads about how disappointing it all is. So let me help spread the word. If you live in or near Grand Rapids, Michigan, Santa Ana, California, or Ottawa, Ontario you’re set to be deluged with advertising for this exhibit in the next few months. Don’t fall for the hype.
But they didn’t market it to you. They marketed it to your children–and quite successfully too. You can see the same principle at work when parents take children down the cereal aisle of the grocery store and the children choose those sugar-laden cereals with the bright pictures of cartoon characters on the front.
I would also be a bit concerned about the message they are giving about gender roles. The male character seems to be taking action–riding some kind of vehicle–vroom vroom. The female character looks more passive, she’s doing nothing? Or maybe she has the social responsibility of welcoming people to the house? She’s certainly not having fun.
This certainly isn’t a museum-quality display, but maybe Columbus is a podunk town. Were the kids disappointed too? This might be a good time to teach them about advertising. And subscribe to Consumer Reports yourself.
Subscribe to Adbuster’s if you really want to be in the know.
My children were also bored stiff. They expected better, and really, can’t you imagine so many interesting bits based on pulleys, levers, pumps, circuits and so on that could have been done with the construction theme? Columbus can do better; it’s the next-largest city in population after San Francisco.