This week, a revamped Engineering and Innovation Hall opens at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The museum teams with Texas Instruments to give wee tykes a hands-on display of how they can apply the math and science they’re learning about.

Last week, the Perot Museum brought some li’l munchkins from schools in Dallas to try everything out. Li’l munchkins and Scaia.

Naturally, as an award winning journalist, it was my RESPONSIBILITY to try out the activities for myself. Loyal Scaiaholics will recall other instances where I’ve attended events at the museum for the betterment of education.

The journey begins, as journeys often do, at a station where kids competed against each other to clear disks and balls from their territory.

The goal was to figure out the most efficient way to move disks under the wall and move balls over the wall, putting them in your opponents’ area.

Some of the munchkins actually started collaborating with each other and building ramps to hand off balls to each other.

None of the activities comes with an instruction sheet, you see. The CEO said the display does not aim to have kids simply memorize things like they would reading a textbook. Instead, kids can make their own mistakes, learn from the mistakes and figure out a solution on their own.

At another station, the li’l ragamuffins designed lunar landers that had to be able to land softly enough to protect an egg inside.

Kids at the Texas Instruments Engineering & Innovation Hall in the Perot Museum can also design lunar landers to see if their design would protect an egg inside. pic.twitter.com/F46lfvL2S5

— Alan Scaia (@scaia) November 7, 2019

Spoilers, though: While that particular design would have saved an egg, I learned later there wasn’t, actually, an egg in there.

The computer machine just measured the g-forces on the ship to determine whether a hypothetical egg would have survived. While I’m glad many of the kids were succeeding there, I can’t help but think this was a missed opportunity for some omelets [some space omelets].

The exhibit also lets kids design buildings to see how they’d fare in an earthquake.

In this case, I wanted to shoo away kids while I built my building that would do great even in downtown San Francisco, for cryin’ out loud. The CEO and public relations folks from the museum couldn’t have been happier to explain that they’ve found adults like playing with the exhibits just as much as kids, so they’ve set up adults-only nights.

This discussion came to a head when the PR associate assigned to me encouraged me to take a step back. I looked at a screen and realized she had been transformed into a hippopotamus. If I took a step back, I could become a hippopotamus, too.

They had developed a program where you could stick animal faces on people. That would show kids applications for coding, software and how facial recognition works.

For instance, I never turned into a hippopotamus because I was anticipating. I had my cell phone over my face, prepared to take a picture of Hippo Scaia. I had to lower the phone so the computer machine could measure my face.

You can see the PR associate with the head of a hippopotamus trying to explain that to me. I felt bad the computer machine had turned her into a hippo, so I started asking if there was a more photogenic animal.

The CEO came over and changed us all to zebras.

You see, kids? Trial and error. If you keep at it, some day you might become a zebra, too.