Sneak Peak at New Digital Project on Hall of Northwest Coast Indians

This week a sizable crew of us from the Museum are working downtown at the offices of Global Kids, Inc, through a two week partnership. The project is teaching the Global Kids youth leaders about our Hall of Northwest Coast Indians, the contemporary Haida Nation, augmented reality, and more. I’ll add to this later but, in short, the project will culminate at the Museum next week with a design document that will offer a new way for children to experience the cultural treasures within the Hall.

As we approach the end of our first week, I wanted to share a few photos and videos of the youth and their work.

In this activity we ran a form of Pictionary, to review the crests we were learning about:

We showed the GK Leaders some original art from an artist with whom we are partnering, Shoshanna Greene. With no explanation from us, the teens were challenged to interpret the drawing, imagine they were lost within it, and then act it out. Here is one example:

To learn about the geography of the North West Coast, the teens received puzzle pieces, then used the Web to research the locations of the different First Nations:

In this activity, the teens received index cards with information – representing objects within the Museum’s Anthropology collections – and were asked to pretend to be museum curators. How would they organize the rooms? We then re-arranged the cards to show how cultural halls used to be organized and how people like Franz Boas and the Hall of NW Coast Indians changed all that, introducing the idea of cultural relativism and embodying it within the very structure of the hall.

In this activity at the start of the program, the teens received everyday objects and had to describe them:

More to come…