FIELD NOTES
PLAY TIME AND SPACENew York Hall of Science builds Newtonian fun park Hey, maybe we can go to a Mets game," intones my 10-year-old son, Benjamin, when he learns that our destination is right by Shea Stadium. A few minutes later the yellow cab carrying Benjamin and his fellow fifth grader, Geoffrey Hamilton, pulls up in front of a one-time exhibit hall from the 1964 World's Fair, a structure that resembles an architect's abstraction of the lower part of a rocket. The two have won a reprieve from class on this brightly lit mid-May day to provide a connoisseur's perspective on a new play area adjoining what is now called the New York Hall of Science. I need a fifth grader's eye to give this place the proper once-over. The science museum, located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, is about to open what it breathlessly calls the "largest science playground in the Western Hemisphere." (Michael Walker, who handles public relations for the museum, assures me that it is not the only science playground in the Americas.) The idea for the playground actually comes from India, where municipalities sometimes build such parks before they move ahead with construction of an entire museum. The structures in the new $3.1-million playground are not unlike many of the exhibits inside the museum building, except that their dimensions are many times larger. Slides and teeter-totters attempt to merge the activity of play with the discipline of physics. Benjamin and Geoffrey stop first at the three-dimensional spiderweb, similar to a jungle gym and big enough to accommodate a classroom of kids. Flexible steel cable sheathed in nylon wrapping is tied into interconnected hexagons, the entire structure taking the form of an octahedron. The netlike structure demonstrates the concept of tensile forces--the same ones that hold up the deck of a suspension bridge. Weight applied by the random sneaker induces ripples that realign the hexagonal elements. "It moves with your body," Geoffrey remarks. Asked later what science he learned from his climb, he takes a stab at translating the experience of sitting on top of the 20-foot-plus structure into the requisite physics speak: "For every reaction there is a reaction." Next we mount a platform where a red parabolic dish faces another positioned 80 feet away. A metal ring near the dish marks the focal point, the spot where an ear or mouth can be placed to communicate with someone at the other dish. "Hey, can you hear me?" Benjamin asks softly. "Yeah," Geoffrey replies. "Whoa, this is awesome," Benjamin says. The lesson: a parabolic shape focuses and reflects sound. "It's like a walkie-talkie but with no electronics," Benjamin explains. We move along through the exhibits in the 30,000-foot-square playground, some of which are suspended from an overhead pipe. Geoffrey stops to hit a gong in different places, testing the concept of resonance. Alan J. Friedman, the museum's director, demonstrates how softly tapping the gong repeatedly at certain spots causes the volume to rise steadily to a level louder than if it receives just one good whack. Both kids stage a race down adjacent slides, learning that the fastest path between two points is not necessarily a straight line. The straight slide is a slower ride than the curved one, which resembles a catenary arch, a trajectory that moves steeply for the first few feet before easing off at the bottom. Friedman, who last year won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's award for public understanding of science and technology, takes over to show the boys the difference between standing or traveling waves and a pulse. The playground, which opened this past June, will also have placards and roaming college and high school students relating the experience of climbing the giant net or other exhibits to underlying physical principles. Even if children don't read or ask, Friedman believes they will still learn. "Ten-year-olds may not know physics terms, but they can get a feel for how a structure responds to them, so they have in their head the basic science concepts." As we leave, both Geoffrey and Benjamin give the playground high marks, particularly compared with their three-times-a-week science class. Their elementary science curriculum, in fact, was designed to incorporate hands-on learning experiences. But it definitely did not light flames in young minds. "The first two or three months [of this school year], the only thing we worked on was measuring and classifying string beans," Benjamin says. Maybe a Mets game, accompanied by an explanation of how a curveball is subject to various physical principles, isn't such a bad idea after all. --Gary Stix |