Today we visited the Children's Museum in Cincinnati, and we spent time observing the different styles and purposes of play at the exhibits. It was real fun to see the children (and also the other guys in the group including me) playing there at the different parts of the museum. It was a real "Learning by doing" museum, so you were able to touch everything and to play with everything. I think that this is the big difference from traditional museums. Another big difference is that there is less text because it would bother the children, so that's the way curators want the children learn something, too. Not by reading and only seeing, but rather acting and playing.
It's quite a hard job to adress children in different ages and stages of development. The people, who designed the exhibits, tried to appeal the kids by creating them in a way that different parts of the exhibits were convenient for children of different ages. A good example is the exhibit with the river and the easy "machines" where you were able to do different things with water. On the one hand, little children were able to play with the small boats in the water, and they realized that the boats sink if too much water is in them. On the other hand, you have the watergate where older children were able to see how something like that functions, and what is the use of it. Sadly, this exhibit was not designed very well because most of the children played with the water and tried to splatter the other children. As a designer, you should make the exhibits function only in one way, so that it's easy for the children to do the right things.
Finally, it was a very nice trip, and I enjoyed seeing how the children played with the whole stuff, and, in fact, I enjoyed playing by myself, too! It would be nice if there would be even more exhibits where children act and don't have to read so much because the children want to have fun there and reading is work for them. It's really difficult to design things in a way that children understand them easily, learn many things, and are not bored.
Hi Sebastian,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your comments about too much text for children to read. Do you think there is a way for the museum to use text to encourage children to read as part of the "learn by doing" process?
See you soon,
Jody
It is true that there was too much text for kids. Do you think the parents even read it? In my experience, people do not like to read text much. This seems odd to me because I am always looking for something to read, but I think all modern museums are getting away from text because nobody reads it. They give us recorded text on portable headphones because we'll listen, but we won't read.
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI think it's hard to encourage children to read and I don't know any way. Ruth is right when she says that many people don't like reading. I think they are going in a museum in their free time and want to have a chilly day. A good idea to teach them the things in an other way is to give them protable headphones. So people don't have to "work" on reading. They can chill around and get the information by listening. Time changes and people change so museums have to change, too. Though I like reading about the tings more.
Sebastian