The Tech: Silicon Valley's Public Science Classroom
An earthquake simulator, a DNA lab, and the disk drive that started it all: The Tech Interactive is Silicon Valley's science classroom, in the middle of downtown.
Downtown San Jose's orange landmark is not a tech campus. The Tech Interactive — the hands-on science center on Park Avenue, facing Plaza de César Chávez — has been Silicon Valley's public science classroom since 1990, when it opened as The Tech Museum of Innovation, founded on the premise that the valley owed its children a place to touch the future it was busy selling.
The building does its teaching the valley way: by exhibits you operate. A jet-pack chair on compressed air, an earthquake platform that replays the Loma Prieta shake, a genetics lab where visitors extract DNA, the IMAX dome's films of oceans and orbit — and the Tech Challenge, the annual engineering competition in which teams of students design devices to survive tests the staff devises, which has been running since the museum was a garage-era startup of an idea in 1988.
The institution's deepest exhibits concern the ground it stands on. This is the city where IBM's San Jose laboratories built the first commercial disk drive in 1956 — the RAMAC, whose spinning platters began the data-storage industry the whole valley's cloud still rides on — and where the disk drive's descendants are still engineered. The Tech's galleries carry that lineage from magnetic drums to the bio-tech and space exhibits that mark the valley's current frontiers.
The Tech's audiences are the valley's cross-section in miniature: school buses from every district in the county on weekday mornings, families on weekends, the tech workforce's own children learning what their parents' employers actually do. The center's free and subsidized admissions keep the buses coming from Title I schools across the region — a quiet piece of the valley's social infrastructure.
November is its school-year stride: field trips by day, the IMAX crowds on weekends, the next Tech Challenge theme already in the hands of a thousand student teams. Silicon Valley builds cathedrals to computation for a living. This one it built for its kids, in orange, downtown, where anyone can walk in.
