One of my favorite parts of going to museums is seeing the interactive pieces. Most of the time these tools are intended for children, but I still think that they are a smart way to get most people involved and learn something along the way. While we were visiting Maison de l’Outil and Musée de Vauluisant in Troyes, I noticed that they had more interactive pieces than some of the previous museums we visited. The first interactive piece we saw was a game at the Maison de l’Outil where you tried to guess what material you were feeling without seeing it, and then you could flip the label over and it would tell you. This seems to be more aimed toward kids and is a good way to keep them engaged, especially since most kids wouldn’t find tools as interesting as Historic Preservation majors who paid for a trip about HISP would.
There was one similar to the last one, where you tried to guess what the tool was and you flipped the label up for the answer. I noticed that they tried to have participants use their 5 senses, and that was kind of the theme, but I don’t read French so I don’t really know what their goal was. I imagine it’s to keep kids engaged by using their 5 senses, but I don’t really know how that relates to the museum’s collections.
My favorite interactive piece at the Maison de l’Outil, though, is the “gear game”. It’s a puzzle game where you have to connect the gears together, and I really enjoyed it. Because it is essentially just one big puzzle, it can be used by people of all ages, and everybody’s version of it will look different, which I think is really cool.
As for the Musée de Vauluisant, the interactive activities were a lot more limited, but I appreciated that they had these tools nonetheless. The 2 tools were the coloring table and the mini-museum model where the objective was to attach magnetic art pieces to their correct positions. While the coloring table is pretty common for any place where kids visit, I thought the museum model was really interesting. And pretty much everybody in the class was into it, so I think that says something about its engagement and enjoyability.
