The Hands-on Area in the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum

 

The children’s museum is a space in which 4- through 12-year olds can experience the world through a variety of hands-on activities that complement the displays of the new permanent exhibition in ways appropriate to the ages of these young visitors. The children’s museum is to be expanded by a garden of about a quarter of an acre (1,000 square meters).

 

The new children’s museum focuses on our five senses: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste.

In 600 square yards of space, visitors from 4 through 12 years of age can explore the secrets and amazing abilities of these senses, which enable us to discover our environment. Together with friends, parents, attendants, or teachers, children can experiment and try things out at a number of interactive stations. The visitors are invited and expected to use their heads and their own five senses actively to experience the exhibition. They will learn something about their bodies and about themselves, simultaneously becoming acquainted with the institution of the museum as a stimulating place for the communication of knowledge.

 

The children’s museum confirms the significance of museums as places where knowledge is actively conveyed through the experience of touching, trying things out, jointly doing and thinking, and learning. These pedagogical principles are consistent with the insights and ideas of modern brain and learning research, namely, that experience and the interest to which it gives rise come first, then the steps of cognitive learning that ultimately lead to “understanding.”

 

The discussions of educational policy and theory are presently confined to the indisputably preeminent educational mission of schools and preschool institutions. According to the latest scientific knowledge, the important of extracurricular places of learning, such as museums has long been beyond question. The many years of cooperation that the Deutsches Hygiene Museum has had with schools and preschool programs shows that such learning opportunities are gladly used and could be intensified. The children’s museum offers the chance to make liberal use them.

 

 

kindly supported by:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the Association of Friends of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum