Visiting the Tech Museum in San Jose (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
One of the advantages of going to graduate school in California’s Silicon Valley was that I learned where all of San José’s parking garages were downtown and their opening hours.
People might snicker at that comment, but parking can be a
utopic dream if you arrive late in the day to San José.
There are public transportation options available where you can park
outside the city and commute in to visit the Tech Museum. You should plan to use them, if you cannot
get into the city early.
Once the parking issue is out of the way, the Tech Museum of Innovation
offers interactive exhibits around the themes of Body Metrics, Social Robots,
The Tech Studio, Tech Silicon Valley Innovation Gallery, Tech and Biotech
Gallery, Tech Exploration Gallery, and Tech Test Zone Gallery.
The Tech Museum was set up differently when my husband Laurent,
daughter Florence, and I visited in 2003 due to different technologies that had
been developed at the time. However, our
experience of how the Tech Museum engages visitors still gives a good picture
of what a visit there will be like.
We began our visit by making webpages at one of the exhibits. Then, Laurent and Florence had fun in the
virtual room dodging shooting rays of light.
“Enter the video game,” I thought to myself.
We all made audio recordings, did an animation, got our pictures taken
and doctored them with funny ears (Photoshop prototype?), and made a video with
waves crashing in the ocean. We printed
out our work, which I later saved in family journals.
The next exhibits we visited were in the Earth Sciences and Space
rooms. They had an earthquake simulator
exhibit where you could stand in a space and experience the magnitude of recent
earthquakes. Florence operated an
underwater camera, got moved around in a “space chair,” and pretended she was
operating a submarine with a simulator machine.
At noon, we walked across the street to an Italian restaurant. Laurent and Florence ate pizza with chocolate
mousse as dessert. I had lasagna and a
Caesar salad. You can find almost any
kind of restaurant in San José, which has attracted the world’s brightest to
work in the city.
After lunch, we went back to the Tech Museum and did the “Innovation
Silicon Valley and Beyond” exhibits. We
played with electricity exhibits. We
made circuits that lit up lights and made fans turn. We measured static electricity, looked at
microchips under a microscope, and looked at a computer wafer-making machine.
I liked “Life Tech: The Human Exhibit” as well. I read about the human genome project and
thought of how it could be used and misused.
A thermal video camera showed that Laurent and I both had cold
noses. (Our noses showed up as black
blobs on a video screen.) Laurent and
Florence did a simulated wheelchair race as well as a simulated bobsled run
her. All the simulation exhibits ran
using radio frequency identification (RFID).
I like the exhibit on how ultrasounds work, too.
We stopped in the store before we left. Laurent bought an electricity kit that he was
going to show Florence how to use. He
also bought a book of solutions to worst case scenarios, including how to deal
with abduction by extraterrestrials.
I laughed when I saw that and looked for a solution to dealing with
Hal, artificial intelligence gone bad. I
bought a book for Florence on how to solve algebra word problems.
Florence got some books on earthquakes and software; she liked the
webpages exhibit and RFID operated ones.
I told her math was the language of science and that software lets you
communicate with other people. The Tech
Museum of Innovation makes both of those subjects exciting; that alone is worth
the price of admission.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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