Readings and Projects

Hal Larsson Children's Discovery Museum

The environment we want to affect is a very active place where kids work hands on with materials. Our approach to this process centers around using parents and chaperones as a part of the learning environment that is the art loft. Harnessing the adults can help in a lot of ways.

• By keeping the adults in the room we can give kids more exposure to the artwork, more time to learn
• By harnessing adults' potential prior knowledge of individual children, material and instructions are more likely to be understood
• Having an adult to each child or group of children allows the child to produce work and to function at a level above what they might otherwise (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development).
• An adult provides continuity between the museum experience and home, making it more likely that the things learned in the loft will come up again later. For example, if the adult learns some of the project, they can discuss and continue it with the child later on.

Given that our project is based in San Jose's [Children's Discovery Museum], the Packer and Ballantyne jumps out as offering potential leads to follow in our design process. The discussion of how interaction plays a role in museum visits is also of particular interest as we're focusing on how to use parent-child interactions as a learning resource in the CDM art loft.

One quote in particular from the article strikes me as having a large potential to influence our design:

This tells me, firstly, that any devices, procedures, etc. that are designed to facilitate adult / child interactions can't be text based: otherwise the reading of the text will stop whatever interaction it's trying to promote. Ways to engage with students at the moment should, then, be more like the exhibits in a museum, things to react to and discuss. How, though, do you present projects and interaction methods in a way that encourages interaction, moreover a specific kind of interaction, itself?

There may yet be a place for text in the exhibit, however: one of the parent / kid area concerns is making sure that adults don't help with projects to the point of interference with the kids' work. Perhaps text based exhibits, or design features of the room, can serve to provide a little of this kind of distance from time to time.