Our visit to the Children’s School shone a full light on several aspects of learning and exploration that I had glimpsed at the Children’s Museum but not fully grasped until seeing them in a structured learning environment.

The first is the tactical nature of exploration that drew the children. From the pre-school children singing songs with specific movements, such as stomping and clapping, to the sandbox and the mud, the importance of the physical expression and the tactical experience was clearly demonstrated across all the age groups.

Another connection I made between my observations at the museum and those made at the school was the importance of allowing some “problems” or challenges to arise that the children can fix. This targets the primary objectives of both initiative and industry. At the museum, I also observed the young boy playing with the Rube Goldberg ball track that Jarrek wrote about. He gained the most satisfaction from his experience when the balls got clogged and he had to figure out how to unclog them.

At the school, I first observed this in the preschool when the teacher deliberately set the arrow away from any of the sections on the weather chart. She then asked one of the students what the weather was like outside. This exercise relied on the student’s own ideas and observations to decide where the right place was to put the arrow.

Later, I specifically spent time observing a group of three children playing with the sandbox in the main area with the sunflower and the water tank. They were tried to make a large cardboard tube stand up straight by filling it with sand. It would fall over and each time the young girl in the group would exclaim, “Let’s make another one!” and they would try again using a slightly different method.

A design that is flashy and interesting may be able to catch the interest of a young audience but to be able to sustain and engage their interest, I believe my project will need to incorporate some ability for the participates to problem-solve and explore their own ideas.