Register your interest: Make Your Own Museum in a Box pilot

• Register now

In case you don’t know, Museum in a Box is a tactile, interactive device you can use to explore museum collections from around the world. You can watch our How It Works video if you haven’t seen it before.

Just about every teacher we meet wants a Make Your Own version of Museum in a Box, and we’re ready to respond to that demand. We’re looking to place Boxes into a creative classroom process, as a project-based learning tool, where students select and print their own objects around any subject or theme, produce audio responses, and connect everything up with NFC stickers and our software.

Make Your Own will help kids learn skills like curation, collaboration, critical thinking, writing, audio production, digitisation, information & media literacy, and maybe even 3D printing.

We’re also looking for small cultural organisations to try it, and hopefully an artist or two as well. It’s not just for a classroom setting, and we’d like to see if it’s useful for small museum outreach too.

So, we’re like to ask you if you’d be interested to participate in our Make Your Own pilot programme, which we’d like to run in the first six months of 2019. You can be anywhere in the world!

The rough schedule looks like this:

• End of 2018: recruit participants, design initial materials, prep software, gather hardware stock
• Jan-Mar 2019: conduct baseline evaluation, build hardware/boxes, send out Kits
• Apr-Jun 2019: continue evaluation, design iteration as needed, conduct short term completion evaluation, determine scaling requirements

Our target is to work with 20 schools or smaller cultural organisations in the pilot, but, if this registration of interest process shows a lot more demand, we’ll see what we can do about expanding that ambition!

What we’ll provide, at no charge:

• One free Make Your Own starter kit (contains a Box, 20 NFC stickers, our software platform)
• An iterative set of progressive curriculum outlines that can be adapted to your students’ age
• Lesson plan suggestions to facilitate producing materials for the box (objects and content)
• Good cheer!

What we expect from you:

• A willingness to Really Try The Thing with us
• Availability for either in-person or online interviews
• Creative and critical feedback about what’s working and how you could make it better
• A certain amount of classroom time with your student (or organisation time with your crew) to think about making a great Museum in a Box
• Possible public feedback and/or video interview and/or guest blog posts and things like that

What you’ll get:

• Excitement and gratitude!
• Credit where credit is due, as early adopter, innovative cultural capital builders
• A network of like-minded cultural/educational professionals

So… if you’re interested, do please let us know using this simple Google form!