Curiosity Museum goes Digital
In our last blog, we talked about launching the Curiosity Museum as a live experience for schools and public events. Designed with young learners in mind, the Curiosity Museum provides the space and opportunity for students (aged ten and up) to discover a range of career paths, challenge life and career perceptions, and elevate their aspirations.
Changing Education Landscape
Schools and teachers have a lot on their plates at the moment: we simply don’t know how and when social distancing in classrooms will allow for outreach activities like ours to come back into schools and college settings.
The Curiosity Museum allows young learners to imagine a future they’ve never perhaps considered. It elevates aspirations and focuses ambition. As many young people struggle with the isolation of remote learning, we feel that the Curiosity Museum is more vital than ever.
With this in mind, we challenged ourselves to design and create an online Curiosity Museum. It will make the workshop accessible to young people throughout the UK, whether they are learning at home, in a school or college setting.
Developing the Curiosity Museum Online
We have assembled a team of creative professionals and education experts to design, prototype, test and launch the Curiosity Museum Online. We plan to launch a pilot of the Curiosity Museum Online this autumn.
To start the development process, Curiosity Museum team members explored other careers and education websites, and also online platforms that used ideas creatively to really give their visitors an interesting experience. Some of these were websites where you could ‘travel’ through the solar system, like Starmap; spectacular projection projects from Limbic Cinema; virtual tours in The Hidden World of the National Parks; immersive theatre companies, online games and many more.
The objective was to explore what will inspire young learners and to investigate what we loved (and didn’t love) about some of these online encounters. We used the resulting conversations and ideas to formulate a clear goal for the digital project – to deliver an online Curiosity Museum that supports young adults to explore the potential in their lives and careers.
We then worked on the process that participants go through when they take part in the Curiosity Museum Live and looked at how we could make this digital. What we didn’t want to lose is the ‘magic’ of the Curiosity Museum Live experience. It’s got an intrinsic joy that traditional careers lessons can lack and we know that it’s important that the integral student-led feel of the project is retained.
Following this, we went on to ‘storyboarding’. We were set free to map out and illustrate parts of the Curiosity Museum online process, as we envisioned them individually. From how we could let people know about the project through marketing, to young people’s experience of the platform, how the website might look, to how teachers might engage with it. Once everyone had created a series of ideas, we chose the ones that would most appeal to education providers and young learners, and put them into one storyboard. This forms the basis for the website design – which will come in the next phase of development!
What has been most curious about working together on the development so far is how themes and ideas evolved as we progressed. There were threads of ideas that came up again and again, meaning that we were converging on a new path together for the Curiosity Museum Online.
The next stage of the process will be designing the new platform and testing it with users. We will continue sharing our journey in the next blog.
We can’t wait to start inspiring curiosity in schools again.
Watch this curious space!
To keep up with the latest info from the Curiosity Museum, sign up to our e-news and visit our website and social media.