Abstract
For the past 20 years one of the most popular exhibits at the Boston Children’s museum has been the Bubbles. If parents are patient and supportive, children will sometimes spend 5 hour playing there, with different ways of blowing bubbles having several different activities. In the context of museum visits this is a very long time to spend at one exhibit. Once, while videotaping activities at the exhibit I recorded the explorations of an 11-year-old. She and her brother were manipulating a large loop of string several feet in length attached to four vertical sticks. The sticks could be dipped into soap solution that was in a tray. By carefully removing the string from the solution, the two could create a sheet of soap film that could be stretched into a horizontal rectangular sheet about 2 ft wide and 3 ft long. To make a “bubble” in this manner is exciting not only because of its size but also because of its shimmering colors and undulating surface. These two visitors played with the device for more than 20 min. On reviewing the tape afterwards, I noticed that they tried out several different kinds of manipulations. The sheet of soap film sometimes broke right away as they pulled the string from the soap solution. Despite this source of frustration they persisted in trying out different ways of changing the shape of the soap film. The two hardly talked while doing this and they did not seem to have a conscious systematic program of exploring the soap film.
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Notes
- 1.
An interesting experiment was done once where with a special device the eye of a person could only see one spot of light of the outside environment, i.e., the device moved with the saccadic movement of the eye to result in the same visual information hitting the fovea. The result was that the person stopped seeing the object. It disappeared (Ditchburn and Fender, quoted in Fiske and Maddi, 1961).
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Zubrowski, B. (2009). Play and Variations in Explorations and Representations: The Stereoscopic Principle and Montage in the Design of Science Educational Experiences. In: Exploration and Meaning Making in the Learning of Science. Innovations in Science Education and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2496-1_11
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