Following my summer internship with Kids N Stuff Children's Museum, I partnered with them to update their permanent exhibit Existing Bryan J. Barber II Children’s Stage. I created a 34-page interpretive plan, citing research in play, early childhood education, and exhibit case studies to inform my recommendations. Following through on these ideas, I designed and then fabricated two of the interactives detailed in the interpretive plan. In future updates, Kids N Stuff intends to use my plan as a guide for this exhibit.
The pre-existing exhibit touched on theater's most obvious tenants of dressing up to act out a story, but didn't expose children to any of its equally meaningful subtilties. My goals for this exhibit update were to fosters pretend play and child-caretaker discussions about theatre, theatre technology, and the entertainment industry. Kids' play experiences would lead to the discovery and practice of storytelling strategies and they would walk away aware that there is more to theatre than just acting on a stage. Because pretend play is frequently also social play, the exhibit is designed to encourage cooperative play with other children and multigenerational play between children and caregivers.
My updates included three fabricated interactives as well as dimensions for two additional exhibit elements, as well as a more precise and literature-informed identity to guide future changes to this exhibit. An Early Education class at Albion College is studying how theater elements help kids explore arts-integrated learning at the Children's Stage exhibit at Kids N Stuff. One of their activities is using my Script Writing interactive as a literacy basis to write, dissect, and create a short play with the kids -- teaching the parts of speech in the process!
Shared with permissions, this is the final document I created for my honors thesis and for Kids N Stuff. It has everything from the big idea to exhibit components to design to budget. Check out the whole thing in detail here.
Final Exhibit
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