Month: December 2019

Categories
company news

Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String

Some of our first Make Your Own kits leaving the nest for Spain, Canada, and the USA!

Great Zulu stories and notes from the Arctic,
Bright yellow boxes and Make Your Own pilots,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of our favourite things…

New courtroom faces and snap tins for miners,
Queens losing heads and a lobster that blushes,
New PCBs that can tell you what’s what,
Kids so excited they’re all tied in knots…

Beautiful boxes and factory stories,
Magical objects and Japanese letters,
Powerful gods and goddesses that win,
These are a few of our favourite things…

When the rent comes,
And the bank shouts,
When we’re feeling sad,
We simply remember our favourite things,
And then we don’t feel so bad…

Bright civil servants returning to workplace,
Teachers who test things and tell us what’s working,
Web shop in order and cash coming in,
These are a few of our favourite things…

US museum our top Make Your Own’er,
Bilingual cards made by Spanish teenagers,
Planning new projects in prep for next year,
All of these things fill us with much good cheer…

Visits from artists and kids and fun actors,
Touring to Cape Town and Cambridge and Tilbury,
Red velvet boxes with treasures within,
These are a few of our favourite things…

When the rent comes,
And the bank shouts,
When we’re feeling sad…
We simply remember our favourite things,
And then we don’t feel so bad!

Very happy Chrismahanukwanzakah to you and yours! We’re looking forward to a rest over the New Year, and what fresh mischief we can make in 2020!

Categories
education myomb research

Make Your Own Pilot: Feedback from two Auckland primary schools

One of our Make Your Own pilots, Auckland Museum, created a Box that they have now tested with two local primary schools, and they made this brilliant video to share what happened, and what the students and teachers thought:

Auckland Museum’s user feedback video

We were especially excited to hear how the teacher towards the end leant very naturally into:

  1. how much easier it is when the museum comes to the classroom, and
  2. that Make Your Own is a fluid extension of a museum sending a Box into a class.

Thank you very much to Mandy, Claire, and Tom at Auckland Museum for this wonderful record.

Quotes from the transcript that stood out for us:

  • “It converts objects into stories and audio.”
  • “Yeah, the boop box is really fun cause it’s like having playing and learning combined.”
  • “I really liked the fact that they didn’t have an insight into what it was going to be. They had to listen, they had to use a different sense, rather than just looking or sitting at a device.”
  • “One of the things we’d really love to see is this becoming part of an interactive piece of work for the kids, where the kids get to experience the objects, hear about the objects, link that to their own inquiries, but even being able to take the next step and being able to perhaps code their own little tags, so that they can take what they’ve seen from this and then use that as a way of sharing their own learning rather than just purely receiving the information, being able to create and share information through that medium as well.”
  • “The greatest benefit to us of this kit and this program is the availability to our teachers in their classrooms. And to our kids being able to access this information without necessarily having to go to the museum. And, I think, when we think about how we want to engage our children in learning, every moment counts, so the opportunity for the kit to be here and travel to us and for our teachers to have time with it beforehand, to experience it and think about how they are going to use it really has much wider reaching implications than the traditional model of going to a museum, seeing an exhibitions and talking about it when we come home.”
Categories
commission company news

New Commission: The Tower of London for Historic Royal Palaces

Turns out the Tower of London is literally one of the most inaccessible cultural highlights on the planet. That’s because it’s the Tower of London: Fortress, Palace, Prison.

This presents the Community Engagement Team with a particular challenge: how can they help people understand what a visit might be like? Particularly those who are local? Obviously, the Tower is a huge tourism hotspot, but there are also Londoners nearby who have never visited, and are unlikely to because it’s difficult to access, physically, financially, and culturally. Enter our new Collection, developed in partnership with the Community Engagement team at the Tower, and in particular, Jatinder Kailey. We have created a Collection that explores the three historical themes of the Tower, exploring its existence as a fortress, a palace and a prison. We were also able to repurpose quite a bit of audio that the Tower had produced previously for other contexts, which was good.

This is what the postcards look like:

Anne Boleyn, illustration by Iain McIntosh

Being an Aussie, I particularly enjoyed contributing research and copywriting for the 18 postcards in the collection, studying a bunch of the stories and characters from within the walls, either living there by choice, duty, or force. As I researched, I learned how many people have had been beheaded there, which gave me an idea for the custom container we built to hold the Box and the Collection. What if the Box looked about the size of a head? Grey on the outside, blood red on the inside!

We enlisted the considerable talents of our Maker of Special Things, Takako, who made a beautiful container fit for a King’s head. We supplemented the Collection postcards with some replica objects, like a giant diamond and a coronation anointing spoon, and wrapped everything in red velvet, which usually makes anything way more fun.

Now, Jatinder is reaching out to local groups in the community to visit them, and share the treasures of the Tower with folks for whom a visit is difficult, and we can’t wait to see the results!

It was also a pleasure to drop it off in person at the Tower. What a thrill.

OFF WITH THEIR HEAD!