THE PROGRAMS

Introduction

As we mentioned earlier in this report, staff at each of the museums designed accompanying education materials for the exhibitions. These materials include:

• a teacher's guide, with background information on the exhibition theme, literature and web resources, and hands-on activities teachers can do with their students;
• a family science event guide, with demonstrations, staff-led activities, "self-serve" activities, and more inquiry-oriented activities;
• a family brochure - a tri-fold that families can take home with them, with background information on the theme, literature and web resources, and activities families can do at home.

In conducting our study of the program materials, we reviewed written drafts of the teacher's guides, family brochures and family event guides and made comments and suggestions to education staff about potential improvements. We encouraged education staff to field-test all of the activities and created evaluation forms that education staff could use with visitors and teachers as they tried each activity. In addition, during our summative site visit, we observed a family science event at each of the five institutions. Four of these events took place at the museums in and around the exhibits; a fifth took place in a middle school. 

Overall Quality of the Programs

Since most of our summative work focused on the family science event, and also because this part of the programming materials ties in most closely with an overall foci of the collaborative on family interactions and learning, we will discuss this event in detail in this report. For the most part, the family science events we observed were very popular and drew good crowds to the museums and school where they were held. For example, the Dirt Day at Catawba drew over 300 visitors. All of the sites were very busy and active during the family science events. Families engaged in almost every one of the activities offered.

Education staff included a good "mix" of activities in their family science events. Each family event includes a few longer, more inquiry-oriented activities, some demonstrations and staff-led activities that were shorter in duration, and some self-serve activities that visitors could do on their own. This was a very effective mix of activities. In addition, most of the activities involved simple, easy to gather materials.

Education staff also were successful in designing activities for the family event, family guide, and teacher's guide that both complemented and extended concepts that were present in the exhibition. Some activities helped visitors better understand a particular concept dealt with in the exhibition. For example, one of Discovery Center's activities for Amusement Park Science involves spinning a plastic cup to pick up a marble without touching it. This complements an exhibit about centripetal force in the exhibition. Some activities dealt with additional concepts that the exhibition doesn't address. For example, one of the activities for AirPlay is creating hot air balloons out of tissue paper and testing them. This activity deals with the concept of heat convection that the exhibition doesn't address. For the most part, all of the museums included a good mix of complementary and additional concepts in their program materials.

The complementary family science guide is a tri-fold brochure that the museums made available on their floors for parents and families to take home. The guides include background information on the concepts in the exhibition, activities that families can do at home related to the exhibition topics, and literature and web site recommendations for further information on the topic. At the family science events we observed, visitors were collecting these brochures and keeping them. (We did not see many scattered about the museums and left behind.) In addition, families we interviewed indicated that they would take the brochure home and try out the activities in the guide.

Visitors we observed and interviewed seemed to enjoy participating in the family event activities. In addition, for the most part, the activities we observed did promote some degree of family interaction and dialogue around how to do the activity as well as about the concepts. In at least some of the cases, visitors made direct connections between the activities and the exhibits. For example, visitors to the Sciencenter's family science event used the Age-Height Histogram exhibit and Measurement Factory exhibit in doing an activity about height versus head circumference. They used these exhibits to determine their height. At Montshire, visitors made mini air cannons out of pop bottles and used them to fire air at the flutter disks of the larger air cannon exhibit.

In addition, visitors did come away with some conceptual understandings from their interactions with the activities. For example, after participating in an activity that uses washers to demonstrate inertia at Discovery Center, one parent said:

It was easy for me to translate directions to my seven year-old son. It was about inertia. You hit one and it moves one. If you do three, three move. It's a good way to demonstrate the physics of motion.

Lessons Learned

There were some consistent lessons learned across all five family science events that we observed. These included the value of using experienced explainers; the presentation of instructions; the value to visitors of take-home activities; the use of checklists for visitors; the saliency of the activity versus the concept; and the strengthening of the overall set of activities. We will discuss these in this section.

The Value of Experienced Explainers/Activity Leaders

In general, visitors were more easily invited into an activity when a volunteer or staff member facilitated it. In addition, and not surprisingly, the facilitator, volunteer or staff member leading the activity makes a world of difference in the experiences of visitors, especially with the longer, more inquiry-oriented activities. Highly trained and experienced staff led very high-quality inquiries into the materials and concepts. Those that were less experienced tended to "tell" first and let the visitors experiment second.

Here are a few vignettes from several museums of successful family activities:

One activity that goes along with the Dirt exhibition is an activity about the rock cycle. During the family event we observed, an experienced activity leader led this activity. He gave each participant one each of four kinds of rocks and two different types of vinegar. The kids were asked to make hypotheses about which rock would react the most or least to the vinegar. As the kids poured the vinegar on the rocks, their parents helped them, and there was a great deal of discussion facilitated by the leader about the kinds of reactions they were observing. Visitors we interviewed indicated this was one of their favorite activities because it showed, as one visitor noted, "which rock had the most chemical wear."

At Montshire, perhaps the most popular activity involved families constructing hot air balloons out of tissue paper, experimenting with different widths openings at the bottom of the balloons as well as adding paper clip weights, then testing the balloons in the museum. Again, an experienced activity leader here made a big difference. The leader held a heat gun under the balloons as the families held the balloons. As the balloons heated up, she would ask the families to hypothesize about their designs and what would happen when the balloons would be released. Also, because of the museum's two story open floor plan, the balloons would float up quite a ways, and other visitors in the museums would watch and speculate as to why one balloon was more successful at going higher than another. One family of four very carefully constructed their balloon, ran a first test, discussed what changes they wanted to make, ran back to the programming room to make their adjustments, then came back out to test their second iteration.

The Presentation of Instructions

Another lesson learned came in presenting instructions to visitors. Particularly at self-serve activities, instructions tended to be laid flat on the tables on which the activities were taking place. Visitors often missed them because they laid their materials for the activities out on the sheets.

The Value of Take-home Activities

Several of the family science event activities also included things that visitors could take home with them. These were extremely popular with visitors. Near the end of the day at each museum and at the middle school in Ann Arbor, we observed visitors carefully packing their hot air balloons, helicopters, kaleidoscopes, Native American Stick Games, sand art, rocks, and polymer balls home with them. As one father of two five year-olds we interviewed after the Native American Stick Game activity at Sciencenter noted:

We liked the game and we'll play it again at home. It reminds me of rolling dice. The kids and I liked working together; actually, we thought that was the whole point.

The Use of Checklists

Visitors also liked having sheets that let them know all of the activities that were available to them. For example, at Catawba, visitors checked off the activities they had completed and when they had done them all, they presented their checklist for free snacks at the "Soils Cafe." Ann Arbor used an evaluation form that asks visitors to rate how well they liked each of the activities. Visitors seemed to enjoy completing the form and using it to gauge if they had done all of the activities.

The Saliency of the Activity vs. the Concept

In some cases, the activities that families were engaged in were so absorbing in and of themselves that they overwhelmed the concepts being presented. For example, in the Ann Arbor family event, one of the most popular activities involved families making rubber balls out of Epsom salt, water, and glue. This rubber ball represented a "polymer," a type of chemical chain that appears in certain clothing. For most visitors, however, the making and testing of the rubber balls was so compelling that the connection back to clothing was missed.

Strengthening the Overall Set of Activities

As with the exhibits, not all of the activities were of equal quality. Some were simply less appealing to visitors; others were difficult to navigate; still others had concepts that were difficult to grasp or connect to the overall exhibition topic. We discussed these activities in detail with education staff, offering suggestions for changes and/or alternative activities that either might be more interesting to visitors, be easier for them to do, or more clearly present concepts and inquiries.