During our visit to the Children’s School, I was able to observe children around 4 years old. Overall, I noticed that the children’s attention was caught often by small, solid objects that were easy to pick up and manipulate. Things that were unexpected and colorful also tended to spark interest within the children (for example, pumpkins, toy spiders, an Ipad being used to photograph activities). I found often that they gravitated towards activities and objects that were surrounded by other children, and that they took more delight to doing what others were doing at the same time, rather than completing an activity by themselves. If intensely engaged in an activity already, I observed some instances in which teachers were not able to obtain their attention, or that the children had trouble with switching to a new task presented by someone other than themselves.

Activities that gave the children more freedom and ability to contribute their own ideas seemed to hold their attention the most. For example, the children seemed to partake in activities that involving coloring, producing patterns/designs, or were able to produce something visually interesting much longer than other activities. Similarly, the attention of the children seemed to be held longest when engaging in activity with others present and watching them or when other children were also doing the activity. The curiosity and creativity of the children seemed to be sparked with simpler, non-directed activities. For example, I was able to observe a pair of children create an entire storyline with the use of toy spiders and sticks for a long period of time. It seems most of the interactions I observed were related to children’s objective of initiative, where I saw quite a few of them took the initiative to build upon an already known concept or other’s ideas to make it more individual to themselves.

In regards to my own project, it would do well to incorporate aspects in the project that are able to be manipulated outside of ways that may be more expected and ways that allow the child to create their own sort of thinking, rather than taking an approach where the children are more directed. I think it would be best to make the project such that the main way a child can engage with it is fairly obvious, though other methods of interacting with the object may be less so and take more exploring to understand the output. This way the project would cater both to the child who wants to engage in the project quickly and the child who may be more thoughtful and spend more time with the project. From my observations, the children also prefer to interact with each other, so it would seem beneficial to make the project such that there are ways for other children visiting the museum/their parent/guardian to interact with them.