What is the mission of a science museum in a community?
I think increasingly, all of us realize we have kind of a dual mission. Our mission is to stimulate interest in and an understanding of science and technology throughout the community. If you ask someone in science or engineering when they got interested, it relates to some experience with an adult, either their parents or a teacher or a scout troop, where they first looked up at the sky, or watched an airplane land, or did an experiment and said, “Wow, isn’t that cool?” There is a fair body of research that shows that can happen in an instant and it is not unusual for it to have happened in a museum. Once you have that light bulb turned on, it hasn’t traditionally been part of our role to do all the things it takes to turn that spark into the fire of education. We’ve left that to schools and parents. Increasingly, we find ourselves involved in that role for all kinds of reasons, either in some communities because people think the school isn’t doing a good enough job or because of cutb
