Touching.
As in sweet. Heart touching. Like a little kid learning about science, art and technology at the STEAM Around the Square event in and around Harriet Tubman Square Park in Newark from noon to 4pm on Saturday, May 11th.
But also touching like: putting your hand in everything.
That’s what this day of family fun, created by Audible in association with the Newark Museum, Newark Pubic Library and Newark City Parks Foundation, is all about.
“This is all practical,” said Tamara Remedios, director of neighborhood activations at Audible, an audiobook company that has been a Newark corporate citizen since 2007.
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“It’s building circuits, making gelatin slime, making paintings,” she said. “It’s a range of activities. It’s really touching, feeling and awakening the imagination.”
Finger Exercises
At various locations throughout the park and at the nearby library and museum, children will be invited to touch fossils, build circuits, grow rock crystals, blow glass, make a mug, check out local plants and creatures. They will also have the opportunity to create spin art and record selections from books banned at the Newark Public Library. “I don’t think it’s nervous at all,” Remedios said.
All of this is related to the STEAM – formerly STEM – curriculum: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. All things that, school budgets being what they are, are increasingly at risk. Saturday’s event, Remedios said, is the first of many that Audible plans to host.
“This is an investment in the future,” she said. “We are planting the seeds today. These children will be our future technicians, artists and sound engineers.”
Hands-on learning, as a means of teaching science, is now standard procedure. You’ll find it on every floor of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. In Philadelphia, there is an attraction called the Please Touch Museum.
But it was a radically new idea in 1925, when Charles R. Richards, in his influential book “The Industrial Museum”, caused a revolution in the field.
Until then, science museums were rocks and fossils in glass cases. Nothing that stimulates a child’s imagination. And nothing that showed the process of Science. Nothing that demonstrated how things worked.
Machine age
Technology, Richards worried, was leaving people – especially children – behind. The machine age, he said, has left people ignorant about their own world, or about the origins of the products of their everyday lives.
“In the Far East, particularly in India, the production processes underlying everyday life are revealed to all passersby,” he wrote. “In the open stalls of the bazaar can be seen the brass and copper workers fashioning pots and pans, the tailor working on his clothes, the jeweler and goldsmith in his small forge.”
In America, on the other hand, “the production processes that underlie today’s civilization are hidden behind factory walls… Little is known about these operations carried out by growing boys and girls.”
What was needed, he argued, were dynamic new museums that explained the nature of mechanized society to the average citizen. And explain by letting them do it – showing science in action.
Educators answered the call.
One of the first museums of its kind in this country was the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which opened its new headquarters in 1934. Here, children could press buttons, turn cranks and perform “experiments” on their own. They were giddy at the prospect. The same happened to many adults.
Fun for everyone
“Does a feeling of rebellion rise within you at the mere sight of a sign that says, ‘Keep Out?'” asked the Philadelphia Inquirer on February 11, 1934. “What you need, brother, is a trip to the scientific and technological field. museum housed in the huge white building of the Franklin Institute Memorial.
Here, the reporter said, were “complicated and expensive devices that will perform mysterious and exciting tricks at the touch of a button.” He was delighted. “It’s a circus, this museum,” he said. “And this will cure your ‘don’t touch’ blues.”
Science museums have been actively working since then.
Not just because children learn better that way. Because kids are kids. Try to avoid letting them touch anything.
“If you can’t really touch it, feel it, you don’t feel the emotion of it,” said Audible’s Remedios. “Touching and feeling makes a big difference for children.”
Go…
STEAM Around the Square, noon to 4 p.m., Saturday, May 11, Harriet Tubman Square Park, 501-551 Broad Street Newark. steamaroundthesquare.splashthat.com
