Article ID: CBB001451163

“What Things Mean in Our Daily Lives”: A History of Museum Curating and Visiting in the Science Museum's Children's Gallery from c. 1929 to 1969 (2014)

unapi

The Children's Gallery in the Science Museum in London opened in December 1931. Conceived partly as a response to the overwhelming number of children visiting the Museum and partly as a way in which to advance its educational uses, the Gallery proved to be an immediate success in terms of attendances. In the Gallery, children and adults found historical dioramas and models, all of which aimed at presenting visitors with the social, material and moral impacts of science and technology on society throughout history. Also, there were numerous working models with plenty of buttons to press, handles to turn and ropes to pull. Controversial visitor studies carried out in the 1950s revealed that the historical didacticism was more or less lost on the children who came to the Gallery. Consequently, the New Children's Gallery that opened in 1969 had to some extent abandoned the historical perspective in favour of combining instruction with pleasure in order to make the children feel that `science is a wonderful thing'.

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Authors & Contributors
Ann Gray
Florian Bettel
Erin Bell
Dallas C. Evans
Russell, Ben
Robertson, Emma
Concepts
Technology and culture
Museums
Technology and society
Children and science
Mass media
Radio
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
Great Britain
United States
Wales
New Zealand
Europe
Canada
Institutions
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Pitt Rivers Museum (University of Oxford)
Natural History Museum (London, England)
Science Museum, London
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