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OnExhibit
Children and Learning Issue
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Company Update from Jan
Time has passed quickly since our last issue of On Exhibit. Most recently we have been working with The Children's Museum in Easton, Massachusetts helping their staff with the development process of a new exhibit as well as working with them to re-focus their extensive program offerings. We have really enjoyed getting to know the entire team. In addition, we are delighted to be continuing our work with the Houston Museum of Natural Science who requested our help with the preliminary stage of planning a new Egyptian Gallery.
 This past week I hosted a North Shore museum professionals networking tea at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester with Pilar Garro, Site Manager for The Beauport- Sleeper -McCann House and Ronda Faloon, Director of the Cape Ann Museum. We were thrilled to have over 40 people attend.
As we move towards spring, we are offering a series of four workshops; Collaborative Content Development, Exhibit Design I, Exhibit Design II and Program Development. The first workshop is February 9th at the New England Aquarium. All are welcome. For more details about the workshops, dates, times and costs, please contact me at jan@jancrockerllc.com.
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A Museum
without Walls - For Now: An interview
with Bronwyn Low of The Green
Mountain Children's Museum, Burlington, VT By Lynn Baum The Green
Mountain Children's Museum, (GMCM) is an emerging new museum in Burlington, Vermont.
With a Board of Directors, a mission statement, an exhibit committee and a
lively website, the GMCM has quickly been making a name for itself in this
northern Vermont community even as they search for a site of their own.  Some may wonder
whether Vermont, and especially a site in northern Vermont is a bit of a remote
location. Mia Graham Beer,
Chairman, of the Board, puts those concerns to rest. She points out that
Vermont is one of only 6 states in the country without a children's museum and
that Burlington is both a relatively large and surprisingly diverse city, with
46 different languages spoken in the school system.
Recently I talked
with Bronwyn Low, Co-Chair of the Exhibit Committee, with additional input from
her Co-Chair, Vicki Hayes, about their work in developing exhibits and
activities while creating a presence in the community for a museum that does
not yet have a home.
LB - What guides
your development of activities and exhibits?
BL - Our mission
is to spark imaginations and provide an environment where playing and learning
go hand in hand. Open-ended play
is an important guide for us. In
addition we develop specific goals for each outreach event. Our target age is 8 and under - and we
have a strong green philosophy, as well as a commitment to community by using
as many local materials and resources as possible.
LB - It sounds
like the notion of play is very important.
BL - Right, as
Mia has said, seeing
the power play has on children is always
amazing. Our goal in all we do with the museum is to emphasize the importance
of play. In fact, our tag line is "Learning is child's play."
LB - First Night
in Burlington is a long-standing tradition. I understand the GMCM was one of the events, using a space
in an auditorium. What were some
of your activities?
BL - We had a
couple of projects with the New Years Eve theme. We created a large chicken wire ball 2-3 feet in
diameter. The kids decorated it by
weaving cloth through the openings.
The ball was rigged to the ceiling and dropped every hour. We also had a recycle table with things
like film canisters, cylinders and rice for kids to make noisemakers that they
could use later in a New Years parade.
LB - What else
could kids do when they came to your spot?
BL - We created a
gross motor area that focused on balancing activities. We made low wooden
balance beams and rounds from the trunks of trees cut at different heights.
Kids could leap from tree trunk to tree trunk like stepping-stones. My brother cut up and polished
the rounds from logs in his wood pile - another nice, local connection. Younger
kids would go across with a spotter and older kids would zip around on their
own. We also set up a slack line
that functioned like a low tight-rope..
For the youngest visitors we had building blocks from a local Vermont
company.
LB - It sounds
like the evening was great fun. Is it always like this in your work?
BL - We get to do
the fun stuff - building relationships and creating opportunities for children
to play. I also help with visitor
research and will be planning more events down the line.
LB - This is
great. It sounds like the Green Mountain Children's Museum has already made a
place for itself in the community.
We will look forward to visiting you in your new home.
For more
information on the Green Mountain Children's Museum check out their website at:
www.gmcm.org/
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A Different Mindset
by Deb Sovinee
Children's exhibits require a different mindset. I was once told to design for kids while on my knees and it turned out to be good advice. You have to shrink your perspective, forget the adult that you are. Now try it: right now get down on your  knees and move around like that. It completely changes how you see things and what catches your attention.
Next, if you are designing for infants, lie on your back in the space you are designing and you will find that the ceiling suddenly becomes a lot more important than the floor - much like a doctor's exam room!
Try going up and down steps on your knees, looking at graphics (forget reading for now), reaching for anything touchable. Once you've experienced this perspective, go into taste mode and try putting everything in your range in your mouth! If you can do that without killing yourself you are on the way to designing exhibits for children.
Oh, and did I mention licking everything in sight?
I have always believed that kids, even babies, have a much more sophisticated sense of visual acuity than the simplistic forms more typical of kid design. I have found this to be true in my own experience as a parent and as a designer. And I'm not the only one - there is a great series of cardboard kiddie books by Alexandra Day starting with "Good Dog, Carl". The thing that interested me so much about the books are that they are visually sophisticated like Impressionist paintings yet babies find them very appealing. The books started me thinking about how we underestimate and oversimplify visual design for babies and children.
 An infant area I designed for the Museum of Science, Boston is surrounded by underwater murals I painted and interactives that allow babies to experience Cause and Effect. Oversized, very simple (though not technologically simple) pads trigger mechanisms that make underwater creatures spin, twirl, and move up and down when babies touch the pads.
Fantasy and role-playing is a bedrock of children's exhibits. Children's natural tendency to do this can be encouraged so that they can "be" a geologist, a rainforest canopy scientist, and a veterinarian. I found that if there is a message you want to help children understand one of the best ways to do that is through role-playing.
 An early project of mine was a collaboration between the Providence Children's Museum and the Providence Animal Rescue League, which were the ones who actually hired me. Jane Deming, Director of Education at the time had a vision to reduce pet overpopulation by helping families to understand how to choose a pet, what pets need, and how to care for them. In "Pets and People" they could learn all of that, plus, put on bunny, bird, dog costumes, crawl into the appropriate shelter and imagine, and see, what you would need to have a happy life as that pet. Volunteers were present during specific times to showcase animals and reinforce the messages. It remains one of the most successful exhibits to teach families and children about pet care and choices.
Sometimes, role playing may need some props and help because the fantasy is not common. Such was the case with the "rainforest canopy scientist" at the Museum of Science. Both children and adults could learn to ascend onto a canopy platform and see what a scientist would be doing "high in the trees", or they could have the same experience in a "botanists camp" at the foot of the tree. In both cases actual scientists were consulted to try and recreate as accurate an experience as possible.
My favorite anecdote from that exhibit was when I heard a child run into the botanists camp during a recreated lightning and thunder storm, lights flashing, thunder booming, and look up at the old socks hanging from a clothesline in the  camp and exclaim, "are those socks real? I have some just like those at home!!" In that moment what was most important was that this young visitor could relate to the scientist through the common socks and imagine himself being, and doing, something similar. It is an anecdote I have never forgotten: amidst all the tempting whiz-bang we can create sometimes the simplest experiences that children can relate to are the most significant.
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Pirates Go Green
By Michele Valeri and Ingrid Crepeau
We are Dinorock, an interactive touring puppet company that for the past 25 years has been creating live shows, with original music and a full cast of dinosaur puppets in all sizes and shapes. The philosophy for all of our shows is to present accurate scientific information while involving all the age groups in our audiences. And, of course, all of our dinosaurs have to sing, dance and talk.
This new, green show was commissioned by the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, funded by The Wolf Trap Foundation and a grant from the Henson Foundation. Their one request for the show was that it not include any dinosaurs. We already knew that pre-Ks love pirates and, of course, everyone knows that a pirate's favorite letter is "R". Pirates and the four "Rs" were the perfect combination. And so Junkyard Pirates was born.
The Wolftrap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts was very enthusiastic about this direction for the show:
"Puppets are the perfect learning vehicles for teaching real-world concepts in the most imaginative way. In Junkyard Pirates, the children are learning about the importance of reduce, reuse, recycle, repair from puppets who are all made from recycled materials that the children see in their homes every day!
These "pirate" puppets clearly demonstrate during the course of the show, what all children can do to help the Earth, and that message is delivered by a "pirate" whose head is a shampoo bottle! They will remember both the message and the messenger!"
Lori Phillips, Associate Director, Professional Development
 An upside down tea-kettle made the perfect head for Pirate Chip (seen sitting on Michele's shoulders). The lid became his mouth and his moustache (pirates must have mustaches) is the handle. It turns out that when young children are able to process objects in different orientations it helps stimulate cognitive development.
In one of our first performances we found out just how universal pirate-speak really is. The children, mostly from homes with English as a second language, were already versed in words such as "ahoy", "avast" and "matey". In fact, before we could fully introduce the pirate cast they all assumed the pirate stance (feet apart, hands poised for swords) and kicked off the show with resounding "RRRRs".
By the time Captain Jack Sparetire, Ruffles, Spout and Redbeard sailed away, the children were pledging to uphold the 4 Rs in the true spirit of Junkyard Pirates.
"So many words that we love to say start with AR AR AR
Respect for the earth makes us shout Hip Hooray!
With an AR AR AR
Why are we Rrrrin' all over the place?
Remember we AR who we AR.
Recycle Reduce Reuse and Repair!
Spout: But, Cap'n, that's 4 Rs.
Cap'n Sparetire: So it is, Matey.
Then it's R R R R!"
http://www.dinorock.com/
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Promoting Creative Thinking in Museums
by Lucinda Presley
A young boy at a recent museum exhibit got on a bicycle that is connected to a generator. The generator was connected to fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs and a watt meter. The young boy started pedaling slowly, then as fast as his little legs would go. He was amazed to see how much more energy it took for him to light up the incandescent bulbs than it took to light up the fluorescent bulbs. "I'm gonna' tell my mom to get those curvy bulbs!" he said excitedly. "Me, too!" said his friend, who had been watching. This experience is great for having children connect concepts and relate them to the real world.
Museums like The Leonardo in Salt Lake City, which presents this exhibit to students, are working to greatly enhance this experience and generate even deeper creative thinking in our young visitors. Schools often turn to informal education to provide experiences that deepen their standards-based instruction.
So, what if, close to that exhibit, were other stations and a related exhibit. One station provided open-ended hands-on experiments in energy for these boys. Another station was full of recycled objects, where the boys could be inspired to draw a design for a machine that could move paper clips.
Close by was another exhibit with metal balls that could race down tracks set at different inclines and angles. After experiencing this exhibit, the boys could work together to improve their original machine design, taking it into production using the found objects that had been their inspiration. In connecting ideas through the repeated experience-investigate-design process, the boys were thinking very creatively.
This is the type of creative thinking that a growing body of nationally-recognized sources is calling for. These noted sources include: economist Richard Florida, education leader Howard Gardner, universities such as MIT, in addition to the highly respected Partnership for 21st Century Skills. These sources, and many like them, emphasize the importance of a person's ability to think creatively by making connections between many different ideas. They also point out the importance of the ability to take this synthesis of ideas and create an innovative product. The ability to think creatively, innovate, and work collaboratively, national sources say, will determine a person's success in the increasingly complex 21st century environments.
Integrating concepts and problem solving, would be evident in the boys' experience-investigate-design process. Museum staff and educators can deepen the design experience by involving the boys in the formal design/creative problem solving process. These creative skills can lead to innovation in all fields from aeronautics to social innovation including mammoth problems such as helping Haiti recover from the recent devastating earthquake.
It is this type of creative thinking that is generating a richer interaction with exhibits, in addition to increasing teacher and student engagement and retention of the science content. Teachers additionally report that this approach with classroom programming is helping test scores increase.
The goal then, for museums, is to develop exhibits and experiences for all visitors that not only engage them in the phenomena, but also encourage them to think in creative and meaningful ways.
Lucinda Presley is Director of the Institute where Creativity Empowers Education Success. Dedicated to increasing student and teacher science engagement and learning through creative thinking, this institute works with a number of Texas and national partners. Ms. Presley has a masters' degree in interdisciplinary thinking and has developed creative programming for museums for more than 16 years.
lucinda.presley@gmail.com
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Practicing Design
by Lynn Baum
In late January, six creative beta-testers gathered for the second in our series of "try it at home first" workshops. Our first session, earlier in the fall, focused on collaborative content development. Now we have turned our attention to design. This workshop was the first of two design workshops that we will be offering.
Deb began with a slide presentation that highlighted the design process. One point in particular that seemed to resonate with the group was the importance of including sketches as part of the process; that even when CAD drawings are "sketches" people perceive them as finished products.
From there Deb led into the first activity; to begin thinking broadly about a topic by creating a collage that displayed a range of perspectives and ideas. As for topic selection, Deb reasoned that designers do not get to pick their exhibits, they are given to them and so participants were "assigned" their topics by pulling them out of a hat. The results were wind, wheels, snowflakes, diamonds, parades, and Vietnam. Everyone we as given a large piece of foam core and for about an hour people worked intensely, creating themes and story lines with pictures cut from magazines.
The second half of the workshop was spent constricting their ideas into a smaller, 3-dimensional space. Paper towel and toilet paper tubes were handed out with the challenge for participants to create small scale-like models using a concept from their broader collages. Paired together the first activity expanded ideas and the second was constrictive and forced everyone to distill their concept to it's essence.
 The workshop concluded with presentations of the pairs of collages and tubes, with great discussion about the development of themes and the impact of the materials. We are finding that, in general, these sessions are great opportunities for everyone to play with new ideas and participate in the development process. As one participant concluded,
"These workshops are truly a living WIP (work in progress) community on WIP testing."
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