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By Cathy Hamaker, Exhibit Developer
When we ask our visitors what they like best about The Children’s Museum, the words “hands-on” come up a lot. “It’s so hands-on!” “My kids love how hands-on your museum is.” That’s exactly what we love to hear. In fact, we’ve got a word for all the things in our galleries that let families learn with their hands—we call ‘em “interactives.”
An interactive is anything you might interact with in our museum, as opposed to things you’d just look at. We work hard to come up with new and creative ways to engage our visitors through hands-on activities—so for my first blog post, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about how that process works at TCM.
Most interactives start with an idea, combining the messages of the gallery with the skills and abilities of a particular age group. We needed to develop a preschool interactive to enhance our upcoming exhibit, Polar Bears to Penguins, which would get across the message that the Arctic and the Antarctic are home to different kinds of people and animals. Pre-schoolers love sorting activities, so it seemed logical to come up with something that would let them sort out animals and people into the two different places!
I sketched out an idea for a “wheel of fortune” spinner which could take different shaped pieces in notches at the top (north pole) and bottom (south pole.) When the wheel spins, the pieces dump into a bin below, ready for the next family to come along! As you can see, I’m no designer, so I gave this sketch to one of our graphic artists.
She designed and built a prototype of the activity for me. Made with foamcore and tape, it allowed me to go out on our floor on a Target Free Night and test the activity—would preschoolers play with it? Would parents help them? Would they all "get it?"
Thankfully, they did! The testing let me make some needed changes, such as sorting by color as well as shape, and changing the wording and mix of pieces slightly. Then I gave that information plus our designers sketches to our production team, and voila! Here's the spinner activity in its final form; your family can get their hands on it when you come see Polar Bears to Penguins (open from October 9 til January 2, 2011.) Hope you enjoy it!
