Flow Museum Trunk Prototype
The Mayo College Museum Toolkit Project is a range of curriculum-linked learning activities, games and resources that use artefacts from the school's museum as stimuli in fostering an enquiry-based teaching and learning pedagogy in the school.
Role: Lead Researcher and Learning Designer
Lead Organisation: Flow India
Learners: Students of classes 3 to 8 across India
Sector: K-12 Learning, Culture
The Brief
After working with cultural collections in more than 70 museums, art galleries, and heritage sites, and facilitating learning in cultural spaces for more than 50 schools across India, Flow India realised that while cultural learning is important for developing 21st century skills, it is not always logistically possible for learners to visit these spaces and access cultural resources.
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As part of the core team of designer-researchers, I co-led a research project on developing a mobile museum trunk that could be used in any learning space to teach skills complementary to school curricula across India.
My Design Process
Starting with a prototype age-range of 7 to 10 years and then expanding the project to ages 11 to 13, I first conducted a comprehensive study and mapping of topics from the three most common curricula taught in schools across India- CBSE, ICSE, and the IB.
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After mapping topics and skills taught to these age groups and pulling apart common themes, I then started researching and collecting objects that could be used to spark curiosity and learning in students. A user feedback session led to the narrowing down of a series of objects that could work across the curriculum. For e.g., we used a handcrafted wooden set of Tangrams to teach concepts of grammar and vocabulary through the stories associated with it, about animals and birds by creating shapes from the tangrams, and fractions and units of measure by using the shapes on the tangrams as mathematical tools.
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After identifying the objects, I co-designed a prototype toolkit that included a storage box for the objects that came with a set of handling tools for learners, and a learning guide that included detailed lesson plans, the history and various talking points about each object, worksheets and tools of documentation for learners, and an evaluation guide for facilitators.
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This prototype was again tested with users and presented to schools and museums. ​
Linking an object (Wooden Tangrams) to the curriculum map.
Example of how I mapped topics of the curriculum and connected them to form larger themes.
Outcome
The Flow School Museum Trunk is designed to be a portable classroom museum box for grades 3 to 8 that uses material culture as an adaptable learning tool, comprising of a range of unique objects that are mapped to the curriculum. Along with real or replicas of objects, the box comes with corresponding lesson plans, activity workbooks and evaluation frameworks, making experiential learning easily executable in any scenario.
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To allow teachers to adapt the toolkit to their classrooms, and dive deeper into the pedagogy of learner-centred, object-based learning, I also prototyped a set of Learning Outside the Box™ cards. Each card consists of a method or activity that teachers can use to inspire learners to interact with and learn from stimuli of all kinds!
Impact
The Flow Museum Trunk is still in the process of being tested and further research is ongoing.
A sketch of the Flow Museum Trunk.
Paper prototype of the Object drawer in the trunk.
Learning Outside the Box™ cards I created as teaching tools to help educators bring Object-based learning to their classrooms.
Pages from the accompanying Facilitation Guide I designed.