Summer                                       Hiroshima Moon

The Colorado History Museum tore down a perfectly good building filled with wonderful exhibits and built a new building in its place, a building with none of the exhibits.  A strange decision on their part, it seems to me, but, hey.  It’s their state.

In its place the same lot now contains a brand new history center, a large parking ramp and a court building, presumably a state court since the Colorado capitol building sits less than two blocks away.

The Colorado folks opted, in their new building, for a different approach to museology.  Whereas the old building had a cabinet of curiosities feel, it was a good one by my lights.  Still, its exhibits were static and didactic, familiar in style to any one acquainted with museums during the 20th century.

The new history center spikes on the engaged learner end of the new museological perspective.  The lobby has a ceiling made of wood from pine beetle destroyed trees.

Just inside the museum proper the first attraction is the floor.  A huge, maybe a hundred foot square map of colorado laid out in terrazzo tile, shows rivers, mountains, lakes and a few other key locations like Denver.  Latitude and longitude markings border the map on which sit two time machines.

Each machine has a distinctive steam punk style with interactive screens and an amazing feature.  The amazing feature is this:  if all using the time machine agree, it can move.   Along the map are several small circles denoting regions like central colorado or southwestern colorado.  The time machine works by region, so that when it is placed in central colorado it’s screens show historical artifacts, e.g. ledger books created by captive native american artists, peculiar to that location.

Near the time machine the visitor can pass through into Destination Colorado.  Through the doors is the town of Keota.  It has a school, a general store, a farm, a rural home and a tin lizzy.  In addition there is a structure called the little house on the prairie.  It has sickle moons cut out of its door.

Each one of these installations is interactive.  The store has items you can take off the shelf and buy.  Each item has a price equivalent to its price in 1920.  A cash register with mechanical keys allows a child to stand on a box and ring up tea, toothpaste, canned milk and baking powder among other things.  Ruth loved the cash register.

She also became fascinated (obsessed?) with another feature of the general store.  There were two wooden boxes with small rectangles inside, enough to hold a dozen eggs.

The eggs came from chickens set up in nest on the farm.  Every once in a while the chicken would cackle, a thunk could be heard and a small hand would reach inside the hole underneath the hen.  After retrieving a wooden egg, it goes in a small wire basket.

Once the child collects sufficient eggs they can take them back to the general store, put them in the wooden boxes one at a time and receive $.23 a dozen.  This is intermittent reinforcement, the strongest reinforcement in operant conditioning and it hooked Ruthie.

We had to stop her after she had collected buckets of eggs.

She also drove the tin lizzy which rides to Grandma’s house by way of a movie showing through the windshield, goes through rain spritzed down from a fan unit above the car and shakes and rumbles across the prairie.

Pretty fun.

Upstairs there was, drumroll please, a skiing exhibit.  Ruth jumped out of her skin at that one.  There she tried out a ski jumping simulation, crashing both times.  “That’s not what happens when I really ski,” she said.

The most impressive moment was, however, yet to come.  A mining exhibit contained another simulation, this one faux blast that required precision placement of dynamite in a particular sequence.  The small movie showed a pattern, then the pattern disappeared.  Based on that brief glimpse the explosives person had to press faux dynamite sticks into the wall in a particular sequence.  After they were in, a plunger was available to set them off.

After the plunger an explosion came on the screen and the mine told you how you did.  I watched older kids try. Their explosions caved in the mine.  6 year old Ruth went up, watched the movie, looked at the pattern, very seriously went over and pressed the dynamite then went over to the plunger and set it off.

“Excellent work, miner,” the movie said. “You brought the rock down in tunnel and did not hurt the mine shaft.”

Ruth ran between exhibits, trying this and that.  Excited.  A great trip.

Afterward we had ice cream.