Museum Makes Learning Easier With Fun, Games

Try explaining what’s interesting about ancient Greek pots to an 8-year-old. It’s not easy.

But thanks to a new gallery game box available for free checkout to families while they visit the J. Paul Getty Museum, the world of Dionysos and Athena, Herakles and the Sphinx takes on a life that children can imagine. They can handle replica shards of ancient vases and be led to figure out how the Greeks repaired the pots without Super Glue. And with a circular game decoder, they can deduce the difference between a drinking cup and a storage jar.

The game box is a black, plastic mini-suitcase available at the museum’s information desk. Inside are three color-coded activities: “Who’s Who on Greek Vases,” in which participants learn how to recognize some of the key characters painted on these pots; “Mixing, Pouring, Storing,” designed to help visitors discover how pots were actually used in ancient Greece, and “Mending and Fixing,” a one-item scavenger hunt to show how the Greeks fixed their pots when they were broken.

Designed by museum educators Diane Brigham and Cathy McCarty-Procopio, the game boxes are unique to the Getty.

Although the Detroit Institute of Arts offers a family activity pack, from which the Getty staff derived some of its ideas for the project, Brigham says she and McCarty-Procopio wanted to take the concept a step further. They needed to avoid the use of pencil and paper--because of the risk pencils would pose to the collection--and they sought to make the gallery game a social, hands-on learning experience for the whole family.

“Learning theory tells us people learn more when more of their senses are involved and they are making connections with what they already know,” Brigham says. Since nothing of value can be touched at the museum, the games and clay pot shards give the families a way to venture beyond the typical approach to a gallery, which is just looking.

The games also give the adults a way out of having to be instant art history experts, trying to answer all the child’s questions. The kits demand basic deduction and close observation and lead families to work together to figure out the solutions to the proposed puzzles.

The challenge in designing the game box was to create something that could be enjoyed by young and old. Brigham and McCarty-Procopio wanted to offer something that wasn’t too scholarly for a Saturday, but also wasn’t too frivolous for a typical museum-goer.

They are now developing a second set of game boxes to be released June 20. These will focus on paintings and will help participants understand something about portraits, style and discerning a painting’s story.

Families will get a chance to put a set of cards depicting events in the 14th-Century painting by brothers Donato and Gregorio D’Arezzo, “The Story of Saint Catherine,” in chronological order, using the painting as a guide. They’ll learn what the details and props in a portrait tell about the subjects, and they’ll have to pick out which painting in a set of cards was made by an artist featured in the collection, based on what the families learn about style.

“All you need to enjoy the museum are a few key concepts and some confidence in your ability to make inferences based on what you’re seeing,” Brigham says. The staff plans a total of three or four gallery games on different aspects of the collection, then to assess the value and popularity of the games.

Part of the motive for creation of the gallery games was to help satisfy the enormous demand for the Getty’s family programs, an ongoing weekend series directed at elementary school-age children and their parents. With a limited number of slots each month, the classes fill up literally within minutes on the first day enrollment is open. Brigham says the games were seen as a way to help families enjoy the museum together, which is one of the museum’s long-term goals for its education program.

The downside of a self-directed program such as the gallery games, McCarty-Procopio says, is that it’s hard for museum educators to be sure that the participants are on the right track. But from time to time, they can see the effects of the games.

McCarty-Procopio says that one recent day, she saw a young boy about 8 years old pull his parents over to the 5,000-year-old statue of a Cypriot goddess near the pot collection after they had finished working with the gallery game.

The goddess’ left arm was broken and repaired in antiquity. He figured out and showed his parents--with great glee--that the arm had been fixed using the same drill-hole and brass-staple method that the Greeks used to fix their damaged pots. What was equally exciting to McCarty-Procopio was that the boy came back to the Getty two weeks later to show a family friend his great discovery.