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I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

f your museum's exhibits could be experienced just as well on an iPad at home, you're doing it wrong. When I was a kid in the ’80s, one of my two favorite places on Earth was The Franklin Institute (TFI) in downtown Philadelphia.

Many of them are connected to body motion sensors a la Xbox Kinect so you don’t need to touch them, but they’re still just video games, where the action-response feedback loop is provided by software, not the universe itself. No screens, just objects and forces — you don’t even need to read anything to enjoy many of the exhibits, such as the one where you sit in one of two chairs hanging from different configurations of block-and-tackle and haul yourself up — and then just let yourself drop, cushioned by a damping piston. And that one should be trivial to design and implement properly: for crying out loud, our local ice cream shop has stools that spin on ball bearings, and I think that would be a big improvement.

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