Getting bigger!

Two girls came in from the rain and spent a long time adding ideas to the hugemongous mind map. I challenged them to build as long a chain as possible, taking it in turns to bat responses to eachother’s ideas. I didn’t get to look at it until after they had gone, but nice work ladies! We’ll be taking some of your ideas as the starting point for tomorrow’s investigations.

Signposts, and the knowledge passed on between kids.

Starting from a concern that if the museum assistants went on strike there would be no guided tours, they got on to thinking about signposting and knowledge being passed between the kids who could direct their own learning independently. Ace!

Tomorrow we will be investigating alternative tours around the museum, designed by little people for little people. Inspectors will be deciding on their own trails through the building, with maps and clues for those in the know.

This is going to be an interesting test to find out how much attention the big people pay to the things happening closer to the ground. Come and join us for The Lowdown!

One of the making tables in a lull over lunch time

The MoR HQ full of busy Inspectors during a making session

So, today’s investigation was all about the idea of making memory machines: if the museum staff were ever to not come in to work, and if there was no-one around to explain what the things in the museums and galleries are, would that mean that we would all eventually forget about things that happened in the past?

We weren’t that happy about that possibility, so the Inspectors designed, made and used some rather marvellous memory machines to ensure that the really important stuff in the building would never get forgotten.

It was really interesting chatting to people about the things they thought were important to remember. The ‘bouncy castle’ and the dinosaurs were understandably top of a lot of lists, but there were also many less obvious choices as well as a few brave Inspectors who set out to remember everything!

The designs were all fab and I was also treated to some very detailed explanations of their construction and how they work. In order to give you a flavour of the inventiveness of the Inspectors, below is a tiny selection of the memory machines made: