Promoting the power of experimentation

By John Howell
Posted 2/21/17

By JOHN HOWELL The Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art, which will soon open a permanent location on Westminster Street in Providence, brought its road show to Atrion, a Carousel Company in Warwick Thursday to the delight of employees, their families

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Promoting the power of experimentation

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The Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art, which will soon open a permanent location on Westminster Street in Providence, brought its road show to Atrion, a Carousel Company in Warwick Thursday to the delight of employees, their families and friends.

Atrion and CEO Oscar “Tim” Hebert, who serves on the RIMOSA board, says RIMOSA fills the niche between the Children’s Museum in Providence and the Boston Museum of Science in that it is directed at sixth to eighth graders. He feels this is a critical period when young minds are receptive to experimentation and discovery. And he said it fosters the kind of thinking that leads to innovation, which is so important to the development of the economy. He notes that no longer do people work one or two jobs during their lifetime, but that according to studies, the norm is to have held 14 jobs by the age of 38 and that many people end up having three careers.

“They’re moving around, experimenting with what they want to do,” he said.

Key to that process, said Herbert, are “portable skills” that can be taken from job to job. Hebert said, “We are expecting more and more from our schools,” but he finds many schools are failing to meet expectations because they haven’t broken away from common core and rigid curricula to open the potential of creativity.

“They are teaching them [students] that failure is bad,” he said. Rather, Hebert sees failure as often the result of experimentation and taking risk that should be encouraged. “We’re afraid to fail today,” he said.

As an example, he cites his personal experience. As a fifth grader, Hebert was recognized as having a high aptitude for math and was placed in an experimental accelerated program where he was introduced to algebra. He took to the program, but when the funding dried up he went back to the regular class. He was then ahead of the rest of the students and bored by the class. He found it pointless to do homework and figured if he could solve the most difficult problem there was no need to do the rest. When he got to college he again found he was being held back and turned to writing computer programs to solve problems to stay engaged. But that wasn’t enough, and Hebert dropped out of college. He enlisted in the Air Force, where he became proficient in 17 computer programming languages through a process of self-education and working in the field.

Hebert sees RIMOSA that has interactive traveling exhibits, which has already reached more than 7,000 children, as running “pop-up” exhibits at malls and public meeting places where kids can try hands-on experiments to create – or fail at creating – what they imagine. The vision as defined by RIMOSA is to “build and sustain a culture of curiosity, creativity and critical thinking that transforms Rhode Island into a leader in innovation for generations to come.”

“The whole goal,” Hebert said of young people, “is to get them stimulated to enter the tech industry.” He doesn’t see a future in bringing back manufacturing jobs that have migrated to other countries. Rather, he sees jobs as being transformed by technology and the challenge being to prepare students for that.

The event Thursday at Atrion was both a social gathering as well as an experiment in that it combined casual conversation over a glass of wine for adults along with some discovery for the kids. And there a few adults like Kurt Harrington of Something Fishy who couldn’t resist the possibilities of designing a raceway for marbles that revolved around a room before ending up in a basket.

Harrington’s objective – “I want to see if I can get it to do a loop.”

That’s just what David Kunitz, a toy designer and seven-year member of RIMOSA, hoped would happen. Kunitz built many of the traveling exhibits and arrived early at Atrion to set up. He said he purposely designed the traveling show so “I can transport it in a Prius.” His expectation is with a permanent home he’ll be capable of taking on larger displays for RIMOSA.

Kunitz emphasizes the connection with art and how it and technology intersect. One of the displays, which worked well because it was in a dark room, was a flashlight suspended from a tripod that swung above a luminous platform to create reflective swirls.

“It’s got to be an experiment. It’s not straightforward learning; you’ve got to give it a try.” Kunitz said.

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