Joe Cox is Constructing MODS for the Subsequent 50 Years
Practically 50 years after the Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS) started introducing South Florida kids to the wonders of science, president and CEO Joe Cox is considering what comes subsequent.
The reply includes synthetic intelligence, local weather innovation, and new expertise. Nevertheless it additionally includes kids digging in filth, constructing with their palms and, most significantly, studying to ask questions. “We actually need individuals to be impressed by science, and we need to encourage individuals 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 the whole lot from experimenting in a maker house to exploring an out of doors tropical meals forest the place kids 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 packages served roughly 75,000 kids all through South Florida at Title I colleges, libraries, Boys & Ladies Golf equipment, and YMCAs. About 80 p.c of these packages have been supplied for gratis to taking part organizations by way of help from companies, foundations, philanthropic companions, and municipalities.
The museum can be serving to put together younger individuals for careers in industries vital to South Florida. Its paid highschool internship program now contains 125 college students and was developed partly 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 possibly can 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 will likely be central to Construct a Higher World, the most important everlasting exhibit MODS has created in additional than a decade.
The exhibit is designed round 4 traits—crucial considering, caring, confidence, and cooperation—and challenges guests to make use of them to unravel real-world environmental issues by way of experimentation, play, and problem-solving. As an alternative of merely telling guests what scientists have found, Cox desires to ignite curiosity. “For a protracted, very long time, museums have been excellent at saying, ‘That is what science has found,’” he says. “Now, what are you able to attempt? 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 Type Designs and the Broward Countywide Resilience Plan. Coral and reef science will even be integrated into the expertise. Construct a Higher World will even introduce Lily, the AI river otter, who will information households by way of challenges as they journey by way of 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 kids 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 by way of constructions.
On the different finish of the technological spectrum is the museum’s IMAX theater, one in every of solely about 25 within the nation geared up with an IMAX 15-perforation, 70mm movie projection system. Its run of The Odyssey has turn out to be 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 influence in additional than attendance. He thinks about generations of South Floridians who first encountered science there as kids, 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 little one to turn out to be 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 need to try to be South Florida’s museum,” he says.
