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When people hear I’m an exhibit developer at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, they often say, “Wow, that sounds like a really fun job!” They’re right, of course—I get to do all kinds of fun things in my job, and one of those things is. . . go to museums!
Wait—don’t I go to a museum every day for work? Why would I want to go to other museums too? I’m glad you asked!
We learn a lot from visiting other museums. For example, one of my current projects is called CSI: Flight Adventures. We received a grant from NASA to help us teach children and families about how things fly; so we’re creating a multi-media show for our planetarium, a display of model aircraft, and hands-on activities, just to name a few parts of the project. We’re partnering with the American Model Aeronautics Association, so first our team went to their museum in Muncie to see their displays and talk to them about model airplanes!
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Later, our curator and our public programs developer went to NASA Dryden Flight Research Center to meet some real NASA researchers and talk to them about our plans for the project. This also gave us some ideas about what artifacts we might ask to borrow from Dryden and other places.
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Then it was my turn; I went to Washington D.C., to the National Air and Space Museum to see their exhibits. While NASM is a very different museum from ours, seeing their Wright Brothers and How Things Fly galleries gave me lots of ideas of how to talk to our families here about the science and history of flight. I got a tour from a member of their exhibits staff, and we talked about the challenges of making a complicated topic interesting and accessible for a variety of ages. I brought back tons of pictures—and ideas!—for the project team.
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