We’ve been voted UK Families’ Favourite Lockdown Activities

NVM At Home programme named families’ favourite lockdown activities

We’ve won an award for our fun family activities during lockdown in the Family Friendly Museum Award From Home! We were awarded a top prize yesterday in the online awards ceremony.

Charity Kids in Museums has held its annual Family Friendly Museum Award for the past 15 years, recognising the most family friendly museums and heritage sites in the UK. This year the charity created a special Lockdown Activity award. This celebrated the extraordinary effort museums made to adapt to lockdown and support families. They asked families to share their favourite lockdown activities – whether it was a film, quiz, game, craft or something else!

The awards were hotly contested – over 400 nominations for the award were sent in from all over the world. In July, an expert panel whittled down these nominations to a shortlist of 26 museums. Over the summer, families tested out the activities and their feedback, along with an expert panel, decided the winners of each category.

We are delighted to announce that the National Videogame Museum won the Best Website Activity award for our Create a Pixel Art Character activity. This workshop was live streamed on YouTube and comes with downloadable worksheets. It was created in early April in response to the UK national lockdown. Hundreds of young people took part and the programme soon expanded into a weekly series of videogame activities. It was very well received by families and led to a further programme of online Pixelheads workshops in August.

Leah Dungay, Learning Officer at the NVM, said: “To be nominated for this award, as such a new museum was an honour. That we were able to win is absolutely amazing. It was lovely seeing young people all across the UK engage with our livestreams, and show us their creations!”