Planning Interactivity for New and Current Audience Groups (Learning Needs, Consultation

‘Planning interactivity for new and current audience groups’ (learning needs, consultation and evaluation) – 3.15pm-4pm (day 1)(slide 1)

Visitors now expect interactive experiences when they visit a museum or a heritage site and see it as a fun and useful way to learn.There is now a growing body of research on the learning occurring in interactive environments covering fully interactive exhibitions, single exhibits or activities that include an interactive element.

What is interactivity?(slide 2)

A lot of time has been spent trying to define and describe interactivity in museums / heritage sites. It has been suggested that we start trying to think of interactivity as a whole range of experiences that fully engage visitors personally, physically and emotionally e.g. an interactive working model, an online learning resource accessed through the museum website within a gallery (or at home) or a hands-on session with dinosaur bones led by a facilitator.

The role of interactives is best understood by looking at the process of visitor learning.

What is learning?

“Learning is a process of active engagement with experience. It is what people do when they want to make sense of the world. It may involve an increase in skills, knowledge, understanding, values and the capacity to reflect. Effective learning leads to change, development, and the desire to learn more. It is about personal development which leads to change. That change can be cognitive, cultural, emotional, social, sensory or physical”.

(based on definition from Campaign for Learning & Resource)

Learning is a combination of:(slide 3)

• Prior knowledge and experience – what the learner brings with them

• Social interaction and the involvement with the physical environment – what happens during the experience

• Consolidation – what happens after the experience

First you will need to decide what kind of learning experience is required and why an interactive exhibit or experience best accomplishes that learning. It is important to remember that interactive components are merely a tool.

Here generic learning outcomes come into play;

Generic learning outcomes fall under the following headings:(slide 4)

Knowledge and Understanding

• Knowing what or about something
• Learning facts or information
• Making sense of something
• Deepening understanding
• How museums, libraries and archives operate

Making links and relationships between things

Skills

• Knowing how to do something
• Being able to do new things
• Intellectual skills
• Information management skills
• Social skills
• Communication skills

• Physical skills

Attitudes and Values

• Feelings
• Perceptions
• Opinions about ourselves (e.g. self esteem)
• Opinions or attitudes towards other people
• Increased capacity for tolerance
• Empathy
• Increased motivation
• Attitudes towards an organisation (e.g. a museum, archive or library)

• Positive and negative attitudes in relation to an experience

Enjoyment, inspiration, creativity

• Having fun,
• being surprised
• Innovative thoughts,
• Creativity

• Exploration, experimentation and making.

• Being inspired

Activity, behaviour, progression

• What people do
• What people intend to do
• What people have done
• Reported or observed actions

• A change in the way that people manage their lives

Potential learning outcomes for visitors need to be clear so that evaluation can demonstrate whether the activity has achieved its aim.

You will need to carry out front-end evaluation with your target audience – find out what prior interests and experiences visitors bring with them to a particular subject area, and research what they might find most helpful in exploring the subject.

Then you will need to think about content and process before considering the mode of delivery. Test your ideas and assumptions at every stage when developing the interactive exhibit or experience by carrying out observation and asking participants questions (one-to-one, in focus groups, by questionnaires). This is called formative evaluation.

After participants have used the interactive/taken part in the interactive experience you can contact them at a later date and ask them questions (one-to-one, in focus groups, by questionnaires). This is called summative evaluation.

Share your findings.We need to combine what we know through experience actually works, carry out front-end, formative and summative evaluation and share what we find out.

For more information (slide 5)

‘Play based learning – case studies from all over the world’9.45am-10.30am (day 2)(slide 6)

What is play-based learning?

Play has been identified by many researchers as an activity through which children construct much of their reality and that play is a key component of a child’s development.

Play is a hugely powerful tool for learning for children of all ages and encompasses a wide range of activities. Play is what children do when they are given the freedom to follow their own ideas and interests, in their own way and for their own reasons. Through play, children explore the world around them and make meaning out of it for their own lives.

The Curiosity and Imagination approach has emerged from the worldwidechildren's museumsmovement. The approach can be applied in a whole range of settings across the heritage sector. Their approach to children's learning combines play with hands-on experience of inspiring objects and environments. Artefacts, buildings, natural objects, historic sites and so on can inspire children to make discoveries and connections, engaging them with new aspects of the world. In this way of working, children's curiosity and imagination are the driving force behind their learning, leading them to develop an understanding of the world which has real resonance for their lives.

There are broadly five different types of play. These are:

Exploratory play (experimenting to see what objects can do and what effect a learner can have on them)

Dramatic play (including dressing up, puppet play, playing with dolls or figures: any kind of story playing. This could be real life, e.g. mums and dads, or fantasy, completely imaginary things where children aren’t trading on experience but rather imagining what to do)

Games with rules (these mainly cover everything from snap to football)

Physical play (play that is based on running, climbing, jumping, stretching etc. but can include dancing and movement where it’s free expression)

Construction play (play that involves making something in 3D, where some level of experimentation is taking place. Can also include disassembling something in 3D)

It is important to offer opportunities for different learning styles - whilst many children are active doers, others do prefer to read, to watch others, to use their senses, to reflect, to problem solve, to logic things out or to be creative.

It is also important to remember that children always come to museums and heritage sites in social groups; the agenda is rarely solely theirs but a mix:

Family groups

-Mixed age, with parents, other family adults or carers

Friendship groups

-Peer groups from playgroups, pre-schools and nurseries and schools

The group children come in affect how and what they learn

Children in families

-Children under 7 control the agenda

-Someone usually has responsibility for facilitating the youngest children’s learning

-Many families are used to playing

Children in friendship groups

-Adults have a set agenda, looking for play/learning value

-Children know each other and are the same age

-Adults may not know the children so well

Offer activities for different types of interaction

-Independent interaction (with exhibits)

-Child-child interaction (parallel play, co-operative play)

-Adult-child interaction (adult triggered play, adult facilitated play or adult directed play)

-Difference between familiar and unfamiliar adults

A history of children’s museums

The first children’s museum opened in Brooklyn in 1899. From the beginning it allowed its collections to be handled. In 1913 the Children’s Museum, Boston was founded by a group of science teachers. In 1925 the Indianapolis Children’s Museum was founded by a core group from the community, which included a city librarian, a school principal and a director of art instruction.

These early children’s museums housed collections considered to be of particular interest for children to see and touch, such as stuffed birds, doll houses, rocks and insects. It was not until the 1960s that children’s museums as we know them today emerged.

In 1964 Michael Spock of the Boston Children’s Museum began building props for children to handle and use as aids to their intellectual development. By the mid - 1970s these included live animals to observe and handle with staff, an interactive 'grandmother’s attic' with period clothes and objects, a two storey climbing tower, a TV camera and monitor to operate.

The Exploratorium, offering hands-on scientific experiences for the first time, was created by physicist/educator Frank Oppenheimer, opening in San Francisco in 1969. The Ontario Science Centre opened shortly afterwards.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum re-opened in a new building in 1977. Here industrial artefacts form major structural elements and a stream flows through four stories of neon-lit corrugated metal sewer tubes.

The establishment of new Children’s Museums in America soon became personal projects for many community groups and about eight children’s museums existed by the mid -1970s.

Piaget’s theory (1947, 1969) about the importance of direct experience in the formation of cognitive structure was well known at the time and this theory formed the basis of the design of children’s museums.

The Association of Youth Museums estimates that there are now over 200 children’s museums operating in the United States.

An analysis of what is perceived to work and why

According to Victor Reigner, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, in an article published in the winter 1988 issue of Hand to Hand:

Successful

1. Gross Motor Activity.

Exhibits provide children with the opportunity to explore objects by climbing on or through them. These are often the most popular exhibits.

2. Multi-sensory exhibits

Stimulate several of the 5 sensory modalities, sometimes simultaneously.

3. Sand and Water

4. Exhibits that use collections in creative ways

5. Role Playing

Allows children to experiment with adult roles

6. Costumes

7. Eating and Tasting

At the Capital Children’s Museum, visitors are given the opportunity to make tortillas and hot chocolate as part of the ‘Old Mexico’ exhibit.

8. Animals

9. Places to hide

10. Emulating activities of adults/parents

e.g. supermarket activities

11. Computers

12. Assembling/Disassembling

13. Arts & crafts

Providing the opportunity to make something to take away

14. Exhibits children can understand and master

Activities which require few complex manipulations

15. Humorous or deliberately illogical exhibits

16. Simplicity

17. Tapping natural curiosity

Children have a natural curiosity about certain things e.g. dinosaurs, Egyptian mummies

18. Providing information that children can build upon.

19. Experimentation that requires little formal instruction

20 Exhibits that make good use of interpreters

21. Exhibits that attract attention

22. Exhibits that provide choice and diversity

Unpopular

1. More information / less interaction

2. Exhibits that rely on words

3. Confusing and unclear exhibits

4. Exhibits that don’t relate to children’s activities

5. Too complex

6. Require formal learning techniques

7. Take too much time to use

I’m now going to take you on a short tour of a selection of children’s museum in the UK, first the Livesey Museum where I was the manager from `1994-1997 and thena number of museums I visited as part of a research trip in the USA and Canada.

The Livesey Museum(slide7)

The Livesey Museum is for children under 12, their families, carers and teachers. The museum shows an all-new interactive exhibition every year. At the museum you can learn things by experimenting and investigating, by having fun and using your imagination. Every exhibition is designed to support the National Curriculum at Foundation Stage, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. Admission is free.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum(slide 8)

The Museum first opened its doors in 1899, as the ‘Worlds First Museum for Kids’. It is one of only five children’s museums nationally to have achieved accreditation by the American Association of Museums and is one of only a few children’s museums with a permanent collection. It is currently undergoing a big expansion project on its original site.

As part of their new development they are planning to emphasise collections more now than they have over the last 15 years and in a more creative way. They are still actively collecting objects and want to put more unique objects into the hands of children.

There are 27,000 objects in the collection. ‘Mystery of Things’ was an exceptionally successful temporary exhibition looking at objects through smell, touch and sound as well as utilizing juxtaposition to great effect e.g. a Barbie doll, with unfamiliar objects such as an Ashanti fertility doll. The museum believes that ‘the exhibition helps young people understand the value of their own experiences and how they can use them and their own senses to identify unfamiliar objects and understand the roles they might play in other cultures’.

‘Totally Tots’, a new exhibition is part of the museum’s ‘Learning Early’ Initiative (part of a national focus on the educational needs of young children). This exhibition aims to support conversations about size, scale, colour and physical characteristics, to develop language and to encourage parents to connect with children. They also really want this area to appeal to parents. They have carried out some intensive parent advisory groups and found that the parents wanted the museum to provide depth of knowledge (written and audio) and to reflect the objects represented in the stories and poems provided or used in the programmes.

The permanent collection is utilized in educational programs in the galleries, outreach through collection lending programs to schools and community groups and through educational technology initiatives. The objects are also utilized in permanent, temporary and travelling exhibitions.

The permanent collection is divided into 2 areas; cultural objects (e.g. musical instruments, sculpture, masks, body adornment, costumes, ceremonial objects, toys) and natural history objects (e.g. rocks, minerals, fossils, mounted birds & mammals, insects and skeletons).

This photo shows the popular elephant skeleton. Nearby is an associated interactive where families can work together to put the elephant bones in their correct places on a vertical board with sticky cut out bone shapes.

Real objects placed in secret areas e.g. under the stairs (where only ‘little people’ could easily get to them!)(slide 9)

Canadian Children’s Museum(slide 10)

This museum is for children aged 14 and under and their families, schools and community groups. The focus is on the many wonderful ways in which people are different and alike and that by experiencing other cultures, children come to appreciate and value their own. It has a strong commitment to learning by discovery and working directly with real materials’

It is very different from other children’s museums, in that it operates within (and is a division of) the Canadian Museum of Civilization (a national, federally funded organisation) and provides an effective bridge between children and the collections and resources of this institution.

14 children, aged 8 to 14, advise staff on programmes and exhibition development. Members serve on the Committee for 2 years and meet 4 times a year.

The Canadian Children’s Museum has a permanent collection of 15,650 artefacts, props and hands-on items for use in its exhibitions and programs. It also has access to the world- class collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

The permanent Collection focuses on documenting the activities of children throughout the world, by collecting contemporary and historical elements of children’s material culture, including toys, games, clothing, art, photographs etc.

The Interpretive Collection comprises a collection of objects categorized as either ‘Hands-On’ or ‘Props’. The collection consists of replaceable cultural objects, replicas, reproductions, and duplicates of other objects in the collections.

The Prop Collection comprises a variety of objects which support or enhance specific exhibitions/programs e.g. the bus from Pakistan.

‘Dive into the past’

This slide shows where children can explore the techniques and equipment used in underwater archaeology through a reconstruction of a shipwreck and a seabed environment.

‘Toys and Games’(slide 11)

This constantly changing exhibit space offers visitors the opportunity to play with historical and contemporary games from around the world.

‘Play helps us make friends and

understand how to do things together’

The Forster Dollhouse(slide 12), with its 900 (approx.) furnishings and miniatures, some of which date back to the 1830’s, was handed down through several generations of the Forster family. The earliest miniatures for the dollhouse were brought to Canada by The Fosters from Dublin in 1868. It has been creatively turned into the centrepiece of a wonderful interactive exhibit where visitors can search for specific details e.g. the Grandfather Clock, the toad. It kept me absorbed for at least 20 minutes!

‘Port of entry’(slide 13)

This re-creation of a cargo ship, a busy port, and a customs and shipping office shows visitors how goods are delivered around the world and how trade becomes another means of communication. Real objects are displayed creatively in crates.

Discovery Gallery in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada(slide 14)

The Discovery Gallery opened in 1999. It was developed with the aim of creating a dramatic environment for activity. A theatre set designer was employed to create the space. Located in the Royal Ontario Museum right next door to the Children’s Own Museum (but unfortunately not linked in any way).

An excellent family gallery with an imaginative and well-designed set. Real objects are integrated creatively e.g. in the dinosaur dig area and the cave.

The Children’s Own Museum (Toronto, Canada)(slide 15)

This museum does not incorporate real objects in its displays but is an excellent example of a space where learning to play is paramount. There are excellent resources for parents and carers readily available throughout the museum (to read on the walls and to take away) on ‘Learning through Play’. These are often directly relevant to the specific activities in the area where they are situated e.g. the Workshop, the Sand Tables and the Theatre. The photo shows ‘The Garden Space’.