kylestetz

Yeah I hear you, and fwiw I largely agree with your article. Whether the presence of screens and software-based experiences means they are drifting from their mission is definitely up for debate, but your point is taken! Similar to you I had a hugely impactful trip to TFI in 5th grade, and much later on it was a dream to work there. And now I get to take my 5 year old. It's a special place and it's nice to see people feeling protective of it :)

I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work.

The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require the ongoing maintenance burden. They have a reduced ability to design the exhibits as precisely as they used to and the physical stuff takes a tremendous amount of work and expertise to do well.

That said, the museum is run by people who care deeply about science education and the proliferation of touch screens is something they are sensitive to. The type of content has a lot to do with it (a physics exhibit has no excuse not to be 99% physical interactives), as does the fact that they tailor exhibits to many different styles of learning so that there's something for everyone.

SimTunes was (and will always be) a huge source of inspiration for me. Played it a bunch as a kid. :)

Hey, yeah that's a great idea! I have been keeping my eye out for neat sketches in the wild.

Creator here— Thanks for checking it out everybody! I promise I'm collecting a list of all the great feature requests I've been seeing.

There's a ton of awesome stuff happening in WebAudio right now. If you want more, check out http://audiocrawl.co