Twilight Time interactions -Juliana

This week I wanted to write about my experience working at Twilight Time last Friday. I had a lot of fun interacting with a different age group than I am used to working with at MOXI. I haven’t worked very many events, so to be honest, when the first guests started walking in the doors I felt slightly uncomfortable and wasn’t really sure how to interact with all of the adult guests with no kids around. But once I jumped in and started playing and showing them how fun our exhibits can be, I became more comfortable with it and had so much fun!

It was also interesting to get into deep conversations with people closer to my age and see what they thought of MOXI. A couple approached me and asked why none of the exhibits have explanations, and if there was any sort of guide that might offer explanations to the exhibits. I told them that most of our exhibits do not have signs explaining the exhibits because we want to encourage guests to play and discover and think about things on their own. They did not seem very happy with this answer, so I also told them that any Spark will usually be able to answer questions or help explain an exhibit to them. They then asked me about how Mindball works, which I was happy to explain to them since I did my exhibit guide on Mindball last quarter and am now an expert J. I have never gotten any comment like this by a child guest because they are usually completely content with just playing and exploring on their own, without having to have some science concept they are being pushed to learn. As adults, we are used to going into a science museum expecting that every exhibit will have an explicit answer as to how it works. However, there is clearly so much more opportunity for questioning, exploration, and discovery as shown by the lack of exhibit signage at MOXI.