The beginning of the chapter brought back great memories of me being in the New York Hall of Science. I used to love coming there for the multitude of their extremely interactive exhibits and their Science playground. As a matter of fact, any museum with a lot of science-oriented interactive exhibits was a place to go for me. Now that I am reading the chapter, I realize how my natural curiosity was developed into a strong interest in science by all those informal science teaching experiences throughout my childhood and I see now how much research goes into creating such an exhibit in a museum.

It is true that, whenever we see an expert, we immediately think that this person knows everything about the subject of their expertise, but we usually view this “everything” only as remembrance of the facts. It was surprising for me to read that expertise requires a systematic organization of these facts in order to reflect on our own thinking and make predictions or conclusions. Of course, I should have known that – for years I have felt that a traditional way of teaching, which consists of passing down the facts and asking questions leading to reflection on the learned, was not very effective for me. I am a visual learner and additional modes of learning, provided by interactive reaching experiences, are very important in my case. If I just read the book or listen to a lecture, my interest in a topic can waiver very fast but when I an engaged in the learning visually, it prompts me to reflect on what I just learned and the material sticks with me. Therefore, it was interesting for me to find out that different ways of how people learn about science are researched and then implemented in the learning experiences such as interactive museum exhibits which support learning across six different strands. What I had known instinctively, was explained to me by this chapter in a very detailed way.