Practically 50 years after the Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS) started introducing South Florida youngsters to the wonders of science, president and CEO Joe Cox is considering what comes subsequent.
The reply entails synthetic intelligence, local weather innovation, and new expertise. But it surely additionally entails youngsters digging in filth, constructing with their arms and, most significantly, studying to ask questions. “We really need folks to be impressed by science, and we wish to encourage folks to dream greater,” Cox says.
Cox, who has led the Fort Lauderdale museum since 2018, sees that stability between expertise and hands-on discovery as important to the museum’s future.
MODS has been evolving since its founding in 1977, and Cox says its mission has expanded together with the science it presents. Contained in the museum, that may imply every little thing from experimenting in a maker area to exploring an outside tropical meals forest the place youngsters can dig, style fruits and herbs, and find out about permaculture.
“Households working collectively—that hands-on expertise may be very a lot at our core,” Cox says.
More and more, that mission extends far past the museum itself.
Final yr, MODS outreach applications served roughly 75,000 youngsters all through South Florida at Title I colleges, libraries, Boys & Ladies Golf equipment, and YMCAs. About 80 p.c of these applications have been offered for gratis to taking part organizations via assist from companies, foundations, philanthropic companions, and municipalities.
The museum can also be serving to put together younger folks for careers in industries essential to South Florida. Its paid highschool internship program now consists of 125 college students and was developed partially after conversations with aviation companions about the necessity to construct a future workforce. Cox desires college students to know that an aviation profession doesn’t essentially imply turning into a pilot or flight attendant. “It’s avionics and mechanics,” he says. “You consider pilots and engineers, however you’ll be able to stroll into an excellent profession.”
Environmental science and resilience are one other focus, notably as South Florida confronts rising seas, excessive warmth, and different climate-related challenges. That might be central to Construct a Higher World, the biggest everlasting exhibit MODS has created in additional than a decade.
The exhibit is designed round 4 traits—vital pondering, caring, confidence, and cooperation—and challenges guests to make use of them to resolve real-world environmental issues via experimentation, play, and problem-solving. As a substitute of merely telling guests what scientists have found, Cox desires to ignite curiosity. “For an extended, very long time, museums have been superb at saying, ‘That is what science has found,’” he says. “Now, what are you able to strive? What would you alter?”
Construct a Higher World will introduce guests to applied sciences and initiatives already addressing environmental challenges, together with synthetic seawalls developed by Variety Designs and the Broward Countywide Resilience Plan. Coral and reef science may also be included into the expertise. Construct a Higher World may also introduce Lily, the AI river otter, who will information households via challenges as they journey via the exhibit, constructing an individualized profile alongside the best way.
Different reveals are purposefully low-tech and high-touch. By means of its longstanding relationship with LEGO, MODS has participated within the firm’s Construct the Change program, which asks youngsters to make use of LEGO bricks to plot options to environmental and concrete challenges.
In October, one other tactile expertise arrives with roughly 10,000 outsized magnetic tiles that households can use to construct, create, and even climb via constructions.
On the different finish of the technological spectrum is the museum’s IMAX theater, one among solely about 25 within the nation outfitted with an IMAX 15-perforation, 70mm movie projection system. Its run of The Odyssey has turn into a phenomenon, promoting roughly 62,300 tickets and logging 236 consecutive sold-out exhibits on the time Cox was interviewed. Guests have traveled from so far as Dubai, Peru, and the Bahamas to expertise the present.
As MODS approaches its fiftieth anniversary, nevertheless, Cox measures its affect in additional than attendance. He thinks about generations of South Floridians who first encountered science there as youngsters, then returned years later with children of their very own. “What did they expertise? What made them extra curious? What did they find yourself doing?” Cox asks. He’s heard from dad and mom who say an early go to helped encourage their baby to turn into an engineer, scientist, or physician.
That, Cox says, is the legacy MODS hopes to hold into its subsequent half-century: not merely instructing science, however turning into a part of South Florida households’ lives.
“We wish to try to be South Florida’s museum,” he says.
