Eureka's "All About Me" Gallery

Eureka, The National Children's Museum located in Halifax, West Yorkshire, is designed to engage the minds of children aged 0 - 11 to learn via play. It was at the beginning of the year in March when the decision to revamp the original "Me and My Body" gallery was decided in order to replace it with a brand new £2.5 Million "All About Me" gallery, which has now opened. Eureka were as one would expect, obviously eager that research should be conducted on the gallery.

For this research they enlisted the help of two Undergraduate Students and one Masters Student from Leeds Metropolitan University. The research appeared in the form of a Triangulation study (for those unaware of what a triangulation study is, it's a study which involves the use of three or more methods. These methods are usually a qualitative method, a quantitative method and one which can be either.) In this case the researchers used observation, interview and data collection.

The research was conducted on children aged 7-11 from a primary school and out of 120 children, approximately thirty were used all together within the research. For the observation, it was the job of the researchers to find out how children interacted with each part of the dental area of the gallery. The dental area was chosen specifically as the gallery at its whole was too large to make correct observations and the dental area was an area children hopefully would have most knowledge of. It was found that certain aspects of the gallery were interacted with in far more ways while the smaller and less prominant pieces of apparatus had less children interact with it. A positive does come of this, though; when the children did interact with smaller and less prominant equipment, the researchers found they were using them more as it had been intended.

In the research means of data collection, the researchers were aiming to create a ‘heat map’ of the areas where children went to first within the gallery. This was done by each researcher watching three children when they entered the dental section of the gallery. This was a success and allowed the researchers to create their heat map which demonstrated two things: the bigger the apparatus, the more likely the children were to be drawn to it first, and the second thing found was that the further to left of the section a piece of apparatus was, the less likely the children were to pay attention to it at all. This is surprising as the gallery entrance is toward the left yet children found more interest in sections to the right. This was highlighted as a point of interest.

The final means of interview was not done as in your traditional interview but instead was done by gaining the children’s opinions on the gallery by asking them to draw or write on one of two scales which indicated whether the children liked a piece of apparatus and how much they liked it. This was overall the most successful of the techniques used by the researchers as it gained the children’s opinions and allowed them to rate the equipment.

Overall the study stumbled across some interesting findings (just how many ways a giant mouth can be used) and some more predictable findings (the bigger the object the more kids will be drawn to it). All the same, the project did appear to be worth doing and fun for all the researchers, the staff of Eureka and all the children involved in the study.