During my visit to the Children Museum I chose to observe the visitors as they interacted with the build your own track for toy cars exhibit. This exhibit provided a sloped build area and many track modules to allow fro many different track designs to be made. The age of the visitors who interacted with this piece ranged from the very young of ages 2 or 3 to even the accompanying adults. Over all the split between boys and girls seemed to be half and half.

During the time period that I observed I saw that those interacting with the exhibit were either in small groups of older kids playing together or younger kids paired with their parents. In the case where the older kids played in a group they would build separate tracks and compete to see which could make the car go the fastest; however, in the cases where the parents were there with their smaller child, the child would try to figure out what to do with the exhibit and the parent would help guide them. In the cases where the car got stuck in a valley parental help was usually needed for younger children. Sometimes if a parent came with an older kid they could play and make their own tracks as well.

Over all it was the speed and intricate motion of the track which drew in the visitors. I noticed that they tended to lose interest quickly when they didn’t understand how to make it work such as in the cases where it got stuck and wasn’t moving. The aspect which helped keep the children’s attention was the ability to change the track so that it wasn’t the same experience over and over. The exhibit engaged the children’s creativity and curiosity by creating problems in their track, such as the car getting stuck in a valley or going too fast on a turn, and having them figure out how to fix it so that car moved smoothly again. Also, this exhibit served its purpose well as it addressed all of Erickson’s objectives, autonomy, initiative, and industry. By allowing the visitors to arrange the tracks in anyway that they wanted the children were able to fill the need of doing the activity entirely independently and allowed them to come up with their own track ideas, addressing both autonomy and initiative. Finally they were able to show off their accomplishments when the car made it all the way to the bottom which addressed industry.

The only facilitators assisting with the exhibits were the parents of the children using the exhibit which created a wide range of responses to the children’s curiosity. For the younger kids this meant their parents helped them understand what was going on and helped resolve sharing disputes between other children. For older children the parents were as much a visitor as the children were as after all who does want to play with toys.

As this exhibit was stationed in the garage, it fit in very well into the over all atmosphere of constant motion.  This was made explicitly clear as the garage had the words “Spin Roll Move” written on the wall which was exactly what was occurring as the cars raced down the track.