Songs

Are museums boring for children?

Kids In Museums has produced a report that says the iPod, Nintendo and Wii generation of children are turned off by ‘interactive’ displays with a couple of buttons, a flashing light and a beep.  Hold on – haven’t museums become SO MUCH MORE FUN than 30 years ago when the boredom of staring at Roman pots was really killing? But they do need to come up with something newer.

One suggestion is for fewer buttons, more imagination – roleplay, dressing up, being Alexander Fleming noticing the green fuzz that was penicillin, handling the sort of fossils Darwin found on the Galapagos etc.  But what you really need, in my view, is preparation. To know in advance that van Gogh painted ‘Sunflowers’ for his best mate Gauguin who was coming to stay gives it a whole new flavour.  To understand that early navigators like Columbus only had the stars as a map makes the quadrant seem really cool and inventive (if that’s all you got!). And to grasp that Beethoven was a bit hard of hearing when he wrote his 5th Symphony – well, it paints a more interesting picture for everyone.