> I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
That reminds me of something I’d love to learn a bit more about: the Strong Museum of Play. It appears the Wegmans’ supermarket exhibit where kids are able to work with real point-of-sale equipment has actually gotten equipment refreshes over the years itself, and I was really amused to see how far they went to have a “fully working” setup in the exhibits for kids to play with.
https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/wegmans-super-kids-mark...
The checkout counters are actual IBM/Toshiba SurePOS lanes, with actual current Datalogic scanner scales, and they’ve got a OS4690/TCxSky install and SurePOS ACE running on every single lane. (Or, at least, one of those registers has to be a controller+terminal, the other 5 lanes have to bootstrap off at least one lane, so they’re all networked, too!) They’ve also maintained enough of the store configuration so receipts look just like a store receipt and all (of course, with the Strong Museum as the “store”). And yes, you’re told to only push certain buttons and only scan stuff that’s inside the environment… ;)
Over the years they’ve swapped out the lanes from the old white to the modern Slate Grey, upgraded the scanner-scales, but the UX is still the same as it always was.
You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.
I go to the Strong almost every weekend with my kids and they love it. I think there are some examples of poor uses of technology that the OP is talking about (screens that just replicate something you could play at home). But there is also some incredibly cool stuff that combines technology with physical play.
My kids just use the actual self checkout machines / lanes.
The Museum of Play and Wegmans are really class acts.
I'd honestly love if there was a procession of PoS systems, so you can view and compare the history