Hi-Tech AIDS Message : Health: New computer exhibit at Museum of Science and Industry helps educate teen-agers about the disease and preventive measures.

The message may be daunting, but the packaging has attracted young visitors to the newest exhibit at the California Museum of Science and Industry: a comprehensive look at AIDS, its treatment and how to avoid the deadly infection.

The lifesaving information resides in interactive computer modules--activated by skills usually honed on video games and in pinball arcades. Teen-agers have been mesmerized, museum officials report. Couples and family groups have also clustered around the computer screens, some of them using the exhibit to kick off a discussion that does not usually crop up around the kitchen table.

The exhibit, the first of its kind in the nation, is slated to be replicated in at least eight other cities, museum officials said. The project is partially funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control on the premise that knowledge is the best defense against AIDS.

“We are terribly excited about it,” said Priscilla Holman, deputy director of the CDC’s National AIDS Information and Education Program.

Three interactive computer modules make up the core of the exhibit, located in the museum’s Kinsey Hall of Health.

Together, they provide an exhaustive course in AIDS, using sophisticated computer graphics, game concepts and unambiguous explanations. The materials are frank about the limitations of medical science in combatting human immunodeficiency virus infection, and explicit about sexual and drug-related means of transmission. One module, devoted to prevention, can be activated in English or Spanish, and in text geared to young children or adolescents and adults.

In these ways, in private conversation with a machine, a visitor can learn how HIV thwarts the immune system and sets the stage for AIDS’ devastating and fatal infections.

Or get step-by-step, illustrated instructions on how to put on a condom to reduce the risk of infection during sexual intercourse. Or hear young people talk frankly about sexual pressure and their uneasiness about how to bring up the subject of AIDS.

Other exhibits illustrate the dangers of intravenous drug use--which along with intercourse are the most common ways HIV infection is spread.

The exhibit opened last month. Presiding at the ribbon-cutting was Dr. C. Everett Koop, who as U.S. surgeon general in 1988 mailed to virtually every U.S. household a landmark report, “Understanding AIDS,” in an effort to slow the epidemic through education.

Similar exhibits will open soon at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the New York Hall of Science. These museums developed two of the modules at the Los Angeles museum. It is the first time that science museums have collaborated on the creative end, museum officials say, as opposed to sharing traveling exhibits.

The joint effort helped spread the costs associated with developing software, text and attractive packaging. Cost was also a consideration in designing components that could be easily reproduced for other, smaller museums with limited budgets.

“It allows a lot of communities to be reached in rural areas and elsewhere whose museums might not have the resources to do this kind of thing,” Holman said.

The CDC’s $1.5-million matching grant enabled five more urban museums to join the first three. All are in cities with high numbers of AIDS cases.

The museum group now calls itself the National AIDS Exhibit Consortium. During the next 18 months, all expect to open AIDS exhibits similar to the one in Los Angeles, using the three computer modules as their foundation.

“This is an opportunity for someone to get information at their own pace,” said Andy Handler, education director of AIDS Project Los Angeles and a member of a technical advisory committee to the Science and Industry Museum exhibit. “Because of the way it is set up, a person can ask questions regarding personal risk or the mode of risk. It can be presented on a child’s level or an adult level. If they have specific questions, they can get the answers privately” or in ways more effective than conversation.

A teen-ager who tunes out a classroom lecture may be riveted by one of the computerized modules: a large version of the maze games that require players to get a tiny ball from start to finish without letting it drop through a hole.

In the museum’s version, the ball represents HIV. The path it takes leads from a pink area representing the world outside the body to a blue area depicting the internal workings of the human immune system. The ball must skirt holes labeled bleach (for sterilizing intravenous needles), skin, condom, sexual abstinence and other infection preventive measures in order to get inside the body.

A companion maze shows how the cold virus enters the body, after avoiding holes labeled mucus, hairs, soap and air drying.

In both mazes, the virus that makes it past the external defenses encounters holes representing the biological armamentarium of the human immune system: a white blood cell, a natural killer cell, interferon and a helper T-cell.

In the cold virus maze, any of these holes can swallow the ball and triumph over infection. But in the HIV maze, all of the holes are sealed over--symbolizing the immune system’s inability to fight off HIV. The only hole the ball can drop into is labeled “infection.”

“A lot of students come here asking: ‘Is there a cure? When are they going to come up with a cure?’ ” said Diane C. Perlov, curator of the exhibit. Others say: “It’s not going to happen to me,” or “The scientists are going to fix it.”

The maze, and the interactive videos, show graphically how infection can happen to anyone, and how elusive is the fix.

“The message is that once HIV is in your bloodstream, you can’t get it out,” said Mason A. Sommers, a Los Angeles psychologist who also was a member of the technical advisory committee. “They feel that message in their gut, and that is where you want to get them.”