It adds up

Young people don't often rank math as high as, say, video games, hip-hop music, or skateboarding.

But a new exhibition at the Franklin Institute is intended to make something vividly clear: It's hard to have fun without mathematics.

"Design Zone," which opened last weekend and continues through April 1, offers a series of hands-on creative tools and challenges to help illustrate the relationship between math and the fields of art, music, and engineering. Three interactive areas invite visitors to construct dance grooves, miniature towers, and virtual skate ramps, among other challenges, while illustrating that math makes it possible.

During a preview, schoolchildren huddled around stations such as "Roller Coaster Hills" and "Whack-a-Phone." The exhibit rooms echoed with musical beats and the sounds of sliding objects - not totally unlike the vibe at Chuck E. Cheese's.

Signs posted near each station explained the forces at work as succinctly as possible - how height affects distance on the "roller coaster," and how the lengths of the Whack-a-Phone's Dr. Seuss-like tubes determine its musical pitch.

"Any time we can engage people in something, it lets them explore the phenomena rather than just see it," said Steven Snyder, the institute's vice president for exhibit and program development. "And that's always a better idea."

Some of the challenges get a bit technical, but those activities are among the most fun.

A small catapult range, for example, uses a graph to teach visitors to control the projectile by changing the firing angle. A music-mixing game, which layers repeated riffs over beats, doubles as multiplication practice and a primer for basic rhythmic concepts.

Other activities are more straightforward, like a laser-light projection that users can alter by manipulating ratios.

A hanging scale, which demonstrates how equations work, caught the attention of a pair of students from Philadelphia's Samuel Powel Elementary School. "You get to play with the stuff," said fourth grader Lydia Wilson, changing the weights on the scale. "With math, you can't play with it. You have to do the work."

The exhibition gives children plenty of opportunities to solve problems, but it hardly looks like work as they know it.

"Playing and learning are very often the exact same thing, particularly for young kids," Snyder said.