It doesn’t take too long for someone using a Box – especially a teacher – to say “it would be great if you could make your own”. We’ve listened to that instinct, and have developed Make Your Own Museum in a Box, which anyone can purchase.
🦠Check out our “At Home” project ideas – you can do these without a Kit… what’s in your Cabinet of Curiosities?
We’re offering a four types of Make Your Own Kit:
Each type of Kit comes with at least one Box, NFC stickers, our How To Manual (PDF), and a 12 month membership on our simple web platform. You do the work of putting together a collection of objects and writing their stories, and then use the web platform to bring everything together.
NOTES
- * A membership is a 12 month “early adopter” account, valued at £6 per month. Once your membership lapses, your collections will become read-only. (If you wish, you can purchase a lifetime membership. See the shop for details.)
- ** A small organisation has less than 10 staff. A large organisation has more than 10 staff. We love small museums!
- You are welcome to purchase more boxes, stickers or memberships as you wish. They’re available for individual purchase in the shop.
- If you would like to place a larger order or ask about a commission, please contact us.
Educational Approach
Collaboration and creativity are happy partners as you make your own Museum in a Box. You can easily work in groups around particular objects, or choose different roles within a team, all working towards the same outcome, of having a collection of objects you can use to tell stories with, that are played on your Box.
You have to think through everything, from conceiving your collection to its exhibition or performance. Students take ownership of their own learning, choosing stories or objects that are of interest to them.
Museum in a Box and Make Your Own are both aligned with Bloom’s Taxonomy, an ordering system for learning outcomes. It outlines the cognitive evolution for students as they learn in more depth, in a scale like this:
We love how well Make Your Own can help students develop their own stories, skills and collections, and we’re looking forward to producing more project-based learning ideas for educators to use around it. We don’t want to be prescriptive to the Lesson Plan level, but rather, prompt educators with broader concepts to run with, and links to curriculum areas to help keep that on track.
Thank you to Caroline Keep for connecting us with the Bloom’s framework.
Piloted and Tested
At the beginning of 2019, we sent 40 test Make Your Own kits around the world to teachers, museums, librarians, cultural organisations, after school care programs and a home-schooling Dad in Manchester.
We’re still gathering feedback from our far-flung and hardy pilots, but we’ve declared the pilot a success – about 40% of participants were able to create their own Collections, and quite a few of those even designed and built exhibits to show them off!
Without a doubt, the final part of the Make Your Own process really surprised me, when children try what they’ve made for the first time. That is wonderful.
Susana Oubina, IES Castro Alobre (and Make Your Own pilot)
What are the pilots doing now?
Have a look at how our friends at Smithsonian Libraries have extended their Make Your Own pilot into a full-blown outreach program! It’s called Traveling Trunks, and it’s amazing. Here’s Sara Cardello, Head of Education, doing a quick interview with George and Charlie in November 2019… It’s amazing and brilliant, and even speaks two languages!
Future Plans
- We’re looking forward to adding more and better educational resources into the ecosystem (for different age groups, different curricular areas, even different languages), and we plan to add a forum to the web platform for folks to share materials they’ve developed around Make Your Own.
- The software version online now (Q4 2019) is still relatively rough, although we know it works well thanks to our user research pilot. We look forward to being able to focus on refining the great foundation we have so it’s even easier to use.
- We’re planning that a future version of the Kit also allows you to put the Box itself together too, so you can learn about the tech alongside the content you’re developing.
Online Shop!
We opened our shop in November 2019, and we’re very pleased to see kits being purchased all over the world! From a high school in Arkansas to an author’s retreat in Iceland!