I was observing the gravity room in the Pittsburgh children’s museum. The room itself is lofted above some other attractions. Guests go up via a flight of stairs and then go down a slide to exit. The room makes the occupant question his sense of orientation. We are hard wired to think of the floor as our plane of reference.  However, the room subverts this expectation by titling the entire floor and the all items in the room by 25 degrees. You enter the room and expect to be walking straight and then you suddenly feel pulled to the side of the room by “gravity”.

The guests were usually between 5 and 8 and were always accompanied with their parents. I noticed that most parents with children under the age of the 5 did not let their children enter the gravity room. I wonder if that because they are afraid that they might get confused by the shift in perspective and get sick. Each group was usually one parent and one or more children.  In most situations, the children would be running around on the lower floor and eventually realize that there is a second floor and make his way up there, the parent usually followed.  A lot of the children did not understand the significance of the room at first. They just thought it was a fun, room with a tilted floor. They did not realize that they were begin tricked. Its only when the saw the ball roll up that they were dumbfounded. I remember one the children asking his mother if they were in space. In fact, what usually happened was the group would enter the room, the parents would let the children run from one side to another for a while and then eventually the parents would ask the children how they think the ball is rolling up instead of down. What was surprising is that some children immediately knew that it was an optical illusion (they did not use those words) while others suggested bewildering (in a good way) theories. One of the children thought I was pulling on the ball with a string and making it roll up every time the ball rolled down. Another thought the ball was a magnet and off course one suggested we were in space. The parents reactions were usually just acknowledgements. The parents rarely corrected children, most of them just said wow or “maybe that show it works”, I think it was all about making the child feel as comfortable as possible while exploring and building reasoning skills. The children also behaved differently there were other children present. If there were siblings, they usually competed for the parents attention, if children were with their friends, they tended to interact with each other more than the adults.

In terms of objectives, I think the room encouraged children to question their assumptions about reference planes, although they may not have consciously done it. The children could play on their own in the room or with the ball and observe how it seemingly defies gravity. This exhibit was very heavy on autonomy.

There was a facilitator present, however, most of the time the children were to bewildered or excited to pay any attention to the facilitator. They were occasionally pleasantries exchanged between any adults in the rooms, but that’s about it. There were other exhibits in the room below, and they all shared this common notion of tricking you. There was a virtual realty game in which you could pick up and lift boxes as well as a bouncing ball that would always land up in a basket.