Museum Discovery Institute: Girls Designing in Cyberspace

2001

Museums have long been the repository of important cultural items. They make these items available to public view in exhibitions in specially designed architectural spaces, and more recently, in the virtual spaces provided on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM. By making their collections accessible to the public in carefully crafted and coherent presentations, museums serve an important mission of perpetuating cultural heritage through the educational experiences they offer to the public. Schools share a mission of cultural preservation with museums, making them natural partners in the development of effective educational experiences for young citizens. The creation of virtual museums as classroom learning projects is one emerging strategy schools have explored that makes use of new digital media, the World Wide Web and multimedia authoring. This paper presents a culturally responsive emerging model for school-museum collaboration. The Four Directions Project has been working with American Indian Schools to explore the uses of technology for culturally responsive teaching. One approach Four Directions is exploring is school-museum collaboration for student-created virtual museum projects. A Four Directions Model for school-museum partnerships has emerged from these experiences. Two example projects are described and the benefits of virtual museum projects are discussed. (Contains 11 references.) (AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

2017

In this review, we focus on the museum activities and strategies that encourage and support children’s learning. In order to provide insight into what is known about children’s learning in museums, we examined study content, methodology and the resultant knowledge from the last decade of research. Because interactivity is increasingly seen as essential in children’s learning experiences in a museum context, we developed a framework that distinguishes between three main interactivity types for facilitating strategies and activities in children’s learning: child–adults/peers; child–technology and child–environment. We identify the most promising strategies and activities for boosting children’s learning as situated in overlapping areas of these interactivity types. Specifically, we identify scaffolding as a key to enhanced museum learning. Our review concludes by highlighting research challenges from the last decade and recommendations for practice and future research on how to design...

2000

The most ubiquitous of contemporary interactive multimedia (IMM), the Internet, is making steady progress as an interpretive tool within museums.However, its major impact is being felt beyond museum walls. As an outreach agent, the Internet has captivated many museums and particularly their educators. As a communication medium, the Internet allows museum educators to enter the homes and schools of students without their ever needing to visit the museum. Some museum education products try to simulate the spatial and social experience of visiting a museum. However, this approach is just one of many resource "types" educators have deployed as they grapple with the promise and reality of on-line education. This paper explores why and how museums are using the Internet for education outreach, as well as the diversity of emerging on-line education expressions. It also reviews current research into the unique interface, navigation and content preferences of various learners and discusses best practice teaching and learning strategies to help museum educators develop more effective on-line educational resources. (Author/AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

Makers at School, Educational Robotics and Innovative Learning Environments

This document presents the results of architectural design and prototyping of educational kits within the museum context, two case studies featuring a combination of digital technologies and unplugged processes. The field of application is cultural heritage and the topics are part of school curricula. The first case study is a museum display of digital video installations and educational kits that reproduce mechanisms of symmetry from patterned flooring (“www.formulas.it” laboratory, Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University and Liceo Scientifico Cavour” high school). The second case concerns the setting up of a school fab lab in which 3D-printed prototype educational kits are made for schools and museums in Rome, in partnership with the Municipality of Rome and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (General Directorate for Education and Research). The cases involve professional, research and didactic experiences which led to funding-supported projects. The experien...

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction - OZCHI '10, 2010

We address the challenge of creating intersections between children's everyday engagement and museum exhibitions. Specifically, we propose an approach to participatory design inquiry where children's everyday engagement is taken as the point of departure. We base our discussion on a design workshop -Gaming the Museum -where a primary school class was invited to participate in exploring future exhibition spaces for a museum, based on their everyday use of computer games and online communities. We reflect on the results of the workshop, and broadly discuss the everyday engagement of children as point of departure for designing interactive museum exhibitions.

2010

In this paper we report on the successes and challenges of a creative project involving museums, schools and interactive technologies. The MuseumScouts project is EU Comenius 2.1 funded and involves teachers, teacher educators, museum staff, students and researchers from five European countries: Germany (Berlin and Munich), Lithuania (Vilnius), Portugal (Porto), Austria (Linz), and the UK (Bristol and London).

Frontiers in Education, 2021

Taking part in creating location-based augmented reality (LBAR) experiences that focus on communication, art and design could serve as an entry point for art-oriented girls and young women towards career pathways in computer science and information communication technology. This conceptual paper presents our theory-based approach and subsequent application, as well as lessons learned informed by team discussions and reflections. We built an LBAR program entitled AR Girls on four foundational principles: stealth science (embedding science in familiar appealing experiences), place-based education (situating learning in one’s own community), non-hierarchical design (collaborations where both adults and youth generate content), and learning through design (engaging in design, not just play). To translate these principles into practice, we centered the program around the theme of art by forming partnerships with small community art organizations and positioning LBAR as an art-based commu...

Ozchi, 2010

We address the challenge of creating intersections between children's everyday engagement and museum exhibitions. Specifically, we propose an approach to participatory design inquiry where children's everyday engagement is taken as the point of departure. We base our discussion on a design workshop -Gaming the Museum -where a primary school class was invited to participate in exploring future exhibition spaces for a museum, based on their everyday use of computer games and online communities. We reflect on the results of the workshop, and broadly discuss the everyday engagement of children as point of departure for designing interactive museum exhibitions.

Curator: The Museum Journal, 2017

This paper details findings from a collaborative research project that studied children learning to 3D print in a museum, and provides an overview of the study design to improve related future programs. We assessed young visitors' capacity to grasp the technical specificities of 3D printing, as well as their engagement with the cultural history of shoemaking through the museum's collection. Combining the museum's existing pedagogical resources with hands-on technology experiences designed by Semaphore researchers, this study enabled both researchers and museum education staff to evaluate the use of 3D-driven curriculum and engagement materials designed for children visiting cultural heritage museums. This study raises critical questions regarding the practicality of deploying 3D media to engage young learners in museums, and this paper illuminates the challenges in developing models for children to put historical and contextual information into practice. Introduction Children increasingly access museum content through digitally-mediated experiences. While most museums rely on exhibition and engagement strategies that prominently feature visual displays and didactic panels, new approaches that introduce interactive and immersive digital technologies promise to engage new audiences and facilitate novel pedagogical outcomes (Dlodo and Beyers 2009; Eisenberg 2013; Posch and Fitzpatrick 2012). These approaches have, for the most part, been developed across diverse, interdisciplinary research areas ranging from learning sciences to experience and interpretation design. They often rely upon unique or bespoke partnerships with digital manufacturers, content producers, and academic researchers. Despite a growing amount of hyperbole (and critique) around the educational value of 3D technologies in museum contexts (Sportun, 2014; Younan and Treadaway, 2015), the strategies used to engage children with these technologies have received little formal evaluation outside of a handful of early studies in the domain of informal learning (Brahms and Werner, 2013; Wang 2014). Consequently, there is a scarcity of research that addresses how museums can fruitfully engage younger audiences in cultural programming through the use of emerging 3D technologies.