When science centers BLOSSOMED in a fever of directed discovery and hands-on learning three decades ago, few foresaw that their energies would end up celebrating flatulence and vomit. Yet now making its United States debut in St. Louis and Portland, Oregon, is an exhibit that has children cranking a machine until it throws up and playing a set of pipes that blow gas in the key of their choice.
Like the Sylvia Branzei books that inspired it, Grossology, the show, targets the high-pitched single-digit set that often determines where the family goes on weekends. At Science World in Vancouver, British Columbia, where it just finished an encore run, attendance soared 50 percent above normal, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
Grossology, designed by Advanced Exhibits of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, may be the salvation of science centers forced to compete with Hollywood, television, bowling, and other amusements, but its educational component is obviously lacking— unless, of course, kids are actually reading the factoids posted while waiting in line for Gas Attack, a pinball game in which the bumpers are musical foods.
Rob Lunde, Science World's curator and exhibit-content designer, says the show teaches science to children fascinated by the inner workings of their bodies. "We can have strong, classically pedagogical mission statements, and we do," he says. "But if you have dry exhibits, nobody's going to come. That's where the entertainment part comes in."
Some museum officers fret that's the only part. "It worries me that we are insulting our public and even our children," says Hooley McLaughlin, a senior adviser at the Ontario Science Centre, who recently moderated a panel on the marketing-versus-education issue at a conference of the Association of Science-Technology Centers. As science centers, which now number more than 400 worldwide, increasingly take what McLaughlin calls a comic-book approach, the thrill of intellectual discovery that comes from a challenging presentation may be lost. "We are forced now to entertain popular themes, hopefully hiding science inside them," McLaughlin observes. "So we do things on acrobatics, or we find a way to get the ever-popular sex in so people will learn something about genetics."
