Automata Workshop at National Children's Museum

This past week I traveled to the National Children’s Museum in Washington DC to lead a professional development workshop around automata activities and tinkering facilitation.

The NCM is a mix of traditional children’s museum exhibits like a big climbing structure but there are also interesting science center style elements like a giant rollers track or ball run station.

The NCM opened right before the pandemic hit, then shut down for a year and a half and are now getting back in the rhythm of programs, exhibitions and staff training. They have a dedicated “tinkerer’s studio” where they do experiments with drop-in visitors. When I arrived they were playing with a light and shadow exploration and later in the summer they will move towards automata and mechanism activities. We had our workshop with the entire public-facing education staff (MEAs) and managers in this space on a Tuesday when the museum was closed.

We started by having the group try out cranky contraptions as a learner. It was really cool to see the variety of creations that the workshop participants made and the ways that they exemplified the combination of art, science, engineering and storytelling.

After reflecting about the experience as a learner we started into a discussion of the ways that we can support museum visitors through facilitation (or the things that we do or say in the learning environment). I led the team through a slightly modified version of the Project Zero compass points discussion where we talked about facilitation through the lenses of what is exciting, what is worrisome, what do we need to know and what suggestions do we have for ourselves and other facilitators.

After sharing out from the small group discussion we moved to the second activity of the day. We explored a more low-threshold kit exploration with a laser cut frame, chopsticks and different shaped cams cur out of thick yoga mat material. It was the first time that I had used these specific parts and it was really cool to see the ways that the groups investigated the phenomena. There was about 10-15 minutes in the beginning to just mess around with the parts and then they started to add shapes, characters and even more complex linkages to the top of the frame. I think this could be a nice activity especially for younger kids in the space.

At the end of the workshop we talked through the prompt of ‘someday/monday’ where the team identified concrete things that they could put into practice right away but also zoomed out a bit to describe their personal long term vision for the space. It was great to work with the team. I’m looking forward to continued check-ins and collaborations as they start to take these ideas from the training and apply them to experiments with visitors to the museum.