"Pack It Up!" was a fully interactive history exhibit for all ages, targeting primarily families with elementary-school-aged children. It invited visitors to work collaboratively through open-ended object inquiry and primary source analysis. Collaborative exhibit design between the education and collections departments led to an exhibit…

In order better to support children's learning experiences, art museums have begun to establish interactive art exhibitions designed for family visitors. However, as more of these interactive exhibitions are established, some museum professionals are raising concerns about whether these exhibitions actually facilitate young visitors' learning or…

This study examines the impact of a mobile game app on science museum visitors' level of engagement with exhibit content, compared to a non game-based version of the same app. Ask Dr. Discovery (Dr. D) is a question-asking app containing two versions: a Game Mode employing casual game mechanics and an Ask Mode providing a baseline version. We…

This study examines museum presentations and educational activities in the area of technical museology, on the example of the Technical Museum in Brno (Czech Republic). Technical museology counts among the most popular segments of museum culture employed, in particular, in the popularization of science and technology. Through their exhibition…

In 1932, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis debuted a series of fifty educational lending cases. The cases, constructed by museum staff from duplicate or donated materials, covered a variety of topics in the areas of natural and social sciences. While never specifically referred to as intercultural programming or intercultural education, The…

This case study describes the process of designing and implementing a museum school program about race and suggests a number of recommendations for creating meaningful interactions with visitors about complex topics. Education staff at the San Diego Museum of Man set out to teach students about race as a social construct, sharing science that…

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has used a mission-aligned learning framework for more than a decade. Designed to foster and support adult-child interaction in exhibitions and programs, the central tool of the family learning framework is the Assessment of Learning Families in Exhibits (ALFIE) Inventory. ALFIE is used as a tool to plan for…

Launching an ambitious cycle of educational programming can be daunting, especially when the subject of it is unavailable. With some perseverance, flexibility, and a lot of collaboration, the obstacles can be surmounted and the art can shine through. Cathy Callaway examines the Artists' Book Conference entitled "Cultural Bricolage,"…

In 2016, the education department at the National Building Museum offered a series of Late Night programs in conjunction with the Summer Block Party installation, ICEBERGS. The museum wanted to evaluate the programs but had limited resources to do so. In the following article, we describe the use of critical appraisal, an economic method applied…

Since the twentieth century, museums have faced stages of reinvention as pedagogical venues. Because beliefs among groups in terms of race, sexuality, and religiosity are contentious with political interests towards power for dominance, the complex museum world, representing various cultural ideologies, has become an important implication for…

Background: This study builds on a series of studies that examined how augmented reality and various other learning scaffolds can promote deeper conceptual and cognitive understanding among visitors in a science museum. Purpose: We focus specifically on determining the exact affordances of different genres of scaffolds that include augmented…

Research has shown that supporting tinkering and exploration promotes a wide range of STEM related literacies. However, the open-endedness of tinkering environments makes it difficult to know whether learners' exploration is productive or not. This is especially true in museum spaces, where dwell times are short and facilitators lack a history of…

This article looks at the notion of what, not who, is underserved in museum education. The importance of looking through, in, and from objects in order to uncover underserved questions and themes is vital. A willingness to consider new ways to approach collections and display is necessary to have a dialogue with our audiences about how museums can…

How can history museums incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) activities while preserving their missions and identities? How do interdisciplinary experiences lead to learning? A cross-institutional exhibit development and evaluation team wrestled with these ideas as they developed "Create.Connect," an National…

This article explores how to ensure visitor engagement with art objects at exhibition spaces in art museums through relational aesthetics, which focuses on the intersubjective relationship that art objects arouse in visitors. In the 1990s, Bourriaud coined the term "relational aesthetics" in reference to interactive installation art, but…