When I went to the Cincinnati Museum Center a while back, I found out they have a Detective Agency Program for kids. The kids come in and get clues and they go around the History Museum searching for the answers. Jason French, headed up the agency, told me that some of the answers he gets back he never thought of. This Agency gets kids to look around and learn in a different way. It causes the kids to think about the things they are seeing. The kids earn coins for doing this and they can move up in the agency command.
I think this is a great tool for kids. It gets them to pay attention to things in the exhibits and to ask questions about what they see. They get to look at things and interpret them, and they come up with some great ideas. Jason told me that this program is costly to run and it takes a lot of his time, but he enjoys doing it. This program is his baby.
Doing something like this helps kids to learn in a different way, but they are learning by actually looking at things and thinking for themselves. We are getting these kids to think critically but not so much that the task is not fun to do. If we give kids these thinking skills while they are young think about what they can accomplish when they get older. We get more programs out there like this and more students might become more interested in history before they get to high school or college.
The NMUSAF has a similar scavenger hunt program. Visitors run around the museum trying to answer questions and there is a prize for the person in your group who gets the most correct (I think). Fun idea to get visitors engaged.
ReplyDelete