Kids In Museums Takeover Day

Kids In Museums Takeover Day

Friday the 17th November 2023 saw us take part in Kids In Museums’ Takeover Day where we handed control of museum curation over to children from three local schools.

An annual event, Takeover Day, organised by Kids in Museums, is when museums, galleries, heritage sites and more invite young people in to take over jobs normally done by the adults! At the NVM the young pupils became ‘Museum Makers’ for the day working in teams to workshop ideas and generate content they’d like to see in the museum.

They of course had plenty of time to play our range of games too!

Museum Makers

We invited three schools, Arbourthorne Community Primary School, Stonelow Primary School and Northfield Junior School to the NVM in which nearly 150 students become Museum Makers for the day.

Each class took part in an hour-long workshop. In this, they learnt more about the NVM, who works here and what they all do and get them to think about what they think a museum is! With clipboards in hand they were tasked to explore the museum in groups and respond to three different questions:

• Find something in the museum that is surprising to you, and tell us why?
• Find something that is interesting to you, and tell us why? 
• Find something that you wanted to know more about, and tell us what those questions are? 

They then shared their findings, and discussed what goes into planning museum exhibits and the questions our team has to consider. 

Each group then designed and pitched ideas for an exhibit, object, workshops or more, imagining how and why we should add these to the museum. After the workshops, they also got the opportunity to ask questions and of course, play some videogames in the galleries!  

Brilliant Ideas

We were overwhelmed by the amount of brilliant ideas that all three schools generated. Their creativity and hard work has certainly given us some future ideas for the Museum. Here are just some of the amazing ideas they came up with:

🎨 A Pokémon Drawing room (learn to draw your favourite Pocket Monsters!)⁠
🤖 A VR setup in a room called VR Central⁠
🎶 Adding Just Dance and a four player dance machine to the NVM ⁠
👻 A scary escape room and beat a game to escape⁠
🕹 A game combining Minecraft and Fortnite called Fortcraft so you can have the best of both worlds at the same time⁠
✍ A room to write, draw, design and develop videogame stories and ideas⁠
🎮 A timeline of games (this one we’re actually working on for January 2024!)⁠

It’s was a brilliant day and we couldn’t have wished for a better group to have handed control of the Museum over to!⁠ They’ve also played a huge role in our future planning processes.

After the workshops we shared their ideas at the NVM’s internal programming meetings with our wider team. We have also reviewed the new workshop itself, and found it was a fun way to introduce young people to the behind the scenes work that we do at the NVM, so we will be adding it to our list of bookable workshops for schools in the near future. 

We’re certainly looking forward to taking part in next years Takeover Day!