MHC A Second Time Around!

This week, we took our second trip to the Michigan Historical Museum and I felt it to be much more productive than the first time. I had visited this museum once in grade school but I remembered absolutely nothing about it and so being able to take a quick walk through was great!

One of the things that I really liked was being able to see all of the different exhibit designs. This helped me gather some ideas of what a good/bad exhibit looked like in order to postulate ideas for our exhibit that we do not have yet. I realized, as assumed that the exhibits that I enjoyed the most were the ones that had actual objects in them such as cars, clothing, animals, etc. The ones that I found least interesting were ones that were filled with only writing on the walls. While taking our walk-through I tried to put myself in the shoes of a young child, trying to imagine what he/she might be attracted to in the museum since that is who we SHOULD cater our exhibit to, although it is not required. In the same fashion, I realized that I think they would be attracted to the same things: color, tangible objects to touch and look at, videos and music. Another thing I realized was that some of the exhibits with writing on them were a little detailed and used somewhat large words. Can 4^th and 5^th graders read this well yet? Maybe yes, maybe no! Even so, we need to make our story for I-496 not only appealing to the public but also SIMPLE so that everyone can participate.

I feel that now that we all have been able to see real exhibit examples, I think we can really get to moving on what we want to do for ours. The one thing is, is what are we going to do. We have a story but we have no actual personal interviews or photos of people from the time. The only things that we have are maps of the area during the time and how they have changed, so my question is, is what can we do with what we have to make an interesting exhibit that people want to look at? Most of the exhibits at the MHC had objects and things to possibly touch or music? What can we do to compete with this? I am not sure the answer to this but I do think this is something we need to brainstorm about!