Museums Where Learning Is Play : Forget dusty corridors and hushed tones, these child-friendly galleries teach but don’t preach.

Matt didn’t know anyone in the place, but the 8-year-old felt right at home with the scores of other sneaker-clad kids, all shapes and sizes, who were everywhere, seemingly all running, yelling and laughing at the tops of their voices. He joined them enthusiastically, making tortillas (even grinding the corn himself), driving a sheriff’s car, building a dam out of sand, climbing through mock sewer pipes.

“Just five more minutes,” Matt begged when it was time to leave. There was so much he hadn’t tried, he explained: an ambulance to drive, a jungle gym to build, a wringer washer to work, even a big yellow blimp to navigate. I caved in immediately. After all, Matt was begging to stay--not at a video arcade but at a museum--the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. Dedicated in part to helping children understand how different cultures work together to make a society, at 42,000 square feet this is the largest children’s museum on the West Coast and one of the largest in the nation.

Earlier, a few blocks away, we had stopped at the Tech Museum of Innovation. Housed in temporary quarters while a permanent home is built, “The Tech,” as it is commonly called, is the only children’s museum in the country devoted to developing technologies. Appropriately, it is located in the center of Silicon Valley and is funded by high-tech firms.

In the course of an hour at The Tech, Matt commanded a robot named Vanna to spell his name in alphabet blocks, designed a bicycle on a computer and watched another robot prepare a meal (the robot was designed by a Stanford University scientist who was left paralyzed by an accident). Matt also navigated a computer landing on Mars and examined a model of the Hubble telescope, warped mirror and all. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want to leave The Tech, either.

That is exactly the point, children’s museum officials say. Forget dusty glass cases and exhibit halls where even a whisper is too loud. Forget boring afternoons shepherded along by grim-faced teachers or parents determined to instill serious thought. Museum-going for kids has changed. Drastically. Whether you’re in San Jose or San Francisco, Chicago or Indianapolis, Boston or Brooklyn--even at home in Los Angeles--there are entire museums devoted to children.

There is even a book devoted to the subject: “Doing Children’s Museums” by Chicago author JoAnne Cleaver (Williamson Publishing, revised edition due out this summer).

“The growth of children’s museums has been overwhelming,” says Jeanne Finan, director of the Children’s Museum of Memphis and president of the National Association of Youth Museums. There are now more than 300 children’s museums across the country, she said--half opened just in the last five years. “Virtually every major city has one or is planning one,” Finan said.

Even Las Vegas has a good kid’s museum: the Lied Discovery Children’s Museum, where, on a recent visit, 6-year-old Regina was able to “earn” money at a job, cash a paycheck at the bank and then shop for groceries. It wasn’t that easy, she discovered, to stay within her budget. She had to put back the big red $20 plastic lobster. Too bad our nation’s budget woes aren’t so easily solved.

And maybe we’d understand each other better if we could try on other identities and jobs as easily as children can in these museums. They can explore the inner city in Boston or Africa in Chicago. They can fly the space shuttle in Las Vegas, run a circus in Boston and serve dinner to animals in Brooklyn.

Kids can work out on plastic-tiled slopes at the Denver Children’s Museum, which specializes in teaching children to ski. They can visit a traditional Japanese home in Boston. They can operate a fishing boat at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a facility that offers interactive exhibits that explore the ocean in Sausalito. Or, in Las Vegas, they can learn what it feels like to use a wheelchair.

The diaper set hasn’t been forgotten in these museums, either. They’ll find plenty to keep themselves babbling: crawling through giant tubes in San Jose, “cooking” in the pint-size kitchen in Chicago, gliding down a huge slide at the Magic House in St. Louis or by exploring a child-size cottage at the Children’s Museum of Memphis.

All the while, kids are too busy having fun to realize they’re learning. This is not by accident. Museum staffs spend months designing exhibits with just that goal in mind and exhibits are changed frequently, so don’t think if you’ve visited once, you’ve seen it all.

Significantly, traditional museums now are taking the cue and also are offering more and better interactive exhibits.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium, for example, is one of the best science museums in the world and it has plenty to offer children. There are hundreds of constantly changing exhibits that are popular with kids, including painting with thousands of colors using the latest computer technology. Kids can touch a column of fog and explore their way through the Tactile Dome (make advance reservations for this), a darkened space that can be explored and exited only by using the sense of touch.

Likewise, the Museum of Natural History in New York is this month opening the largest exhibit on global climate change ever developed. With the press of a button, kids can stimulate a storm that would cause the Potomac River to flood Washington.

The kid’s museums listen to what the children want, too.

Chicago’s soon-to-be-expanded Children’s Museum, for example, has a Kids Advisory Council. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the largest in the country and one that is emerging as a leader in addressing the over-10 crowd, polled more than 1,000 kids, asking what they really wanted to explore before building a new 8,000-square-foot gallery. More than two years in the making, the Indianapolis “What if . . . . “ gallery will open on Saturday, complete with an underwater sea lab, a dig for ancient dinosaur bones and an Egyptian tomb where kids can decipher hieroglyphics, just as the kids ordered.

But don’t expect that a visit to one of these museums will be the same kind of thoughtful experience as a morning at the Louvre or an afternoon browsing through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, it’s loud and chaotic. It’s fun. Next time I drive the firetruck.

GUIDEBOOK: U.S. Children’s Museums

--Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, 180 Woz Way, San Jose 95110-2780, (408) 298-5437; $6 for adults, $3 for senior citizens and children 4-18, children 3 and under free.

--Tech Museum of Innovation, 145 W. San Carlos St., San Jose 95113, (408) 279-7150; $6 for adults, $4 for kids 6-18 and seniors.

--Children’s Museum of Memphis, 2525 Central Ave., Memphis, Tenn. 38104, (901) 458-2678; $4 for adults and teen-agers, $3 for children through age 12 and senior citizens, children under 1 free.

--Lied Discovery Children’s Museum, 833 Las Vegas Blvd. North, Las Vegas 89101, (702) 382-KIDS; $4 for adults, $2.50 for students and senior citizens, children under 12 $1.50.

--Children’s Museum of Denver, 2121 Crescent Drive, Denver, Colo. 80211, (303) 433-7444; $2.50 weekday admission for 2-60 (Saturday and Sunday, $3), senior citizens $1.50, children under 2 free.

--Capitol Children’s Museum, 800 Third St. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002, (202) 543-8600; $6 for adults and children 2 and older.

--Magic House St. Louis Children’s Museum, 516 S. Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, Mo. 63122, (314) 822-8900; $2.50 for adults.

--Chicago Children’s Museum, 465 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, (312) 527-1000; $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for children and senior citizens, children under 1 free.

--Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, 3000 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, Ind. 46208, (317) 924-5431; $6 for adults, $5 for children and senior citizens, 1-year-olds $2, under 1 free.

--Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 145 Brooklyn Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y. 11213, (718) 735-4400; suggested contribution, $3.

--Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 E. Ft. Baker, Sausalito, Calif. 94965, (415) 332-9646; $5 for adults, $4 for seniors, $3 for children 2-17.