The Bounce Array is located in the Garage exhibit of the museum. If you pull all the balls up and then push a lever, a mechanism will release the balls at delayed intervals and create a sort of wave motion.

Location wise, the exhibit sits at the very front of the Garage right next to the entrance, but few children ran to it first. Most didn’t approach the machine until the very end when they were leaving the Garage, so they would play with the lever a few times before running off to follow their parents. Almost all of the children playing with the exhibit were less than 5 years old so they had very short attention spans and only pulled the balls up and pushed the lever once or twice.

Although engaging, children also ran off quickly because the machine did the same thing over and over again and I think they just got bored quickly: all that was happening to them was the balls were bouncing. Once they saw it once or twice they were quick to move onto other exhibits.

I noticed that most children didn’t actually lift all of the balls up before pushing the lever.  Even once they did pull the lever they didn’t actually understand how the mechanism worked: they continued to push the lever over and over again and seemed to believe that it was their constant pushing that caused the balls to bounce. Some parents explained to their kids that pushing the lever over and over wouldn’t do much, but none of them really seemed to understand that concept and really just enjoyed watched the balls bounce. Most the children seemed to understand how to interact with the exhibit though, they all understood to pull the balls up and then push the lever down, although maybe from observing others do it first. Very few children pushed the lever having no clue what the exhibit was supposed to do.

All in all, the Bounce Array is a pretty cool piece who’s beauty is lost on the lower age group. None of them really paid attention at all to the switches that were released when the lever was pushed and most of them didn’t even experience the full thing since they only pushed up maybe half of the balls. Pushing the lever over and over to make the balls bounce amused them for a short while before they moved onto other exhibits.