Chicago Children's Museum | Assoc. VP, Partnership of Playful Learners

Skyline applies design principles derived from the Reggio approach to teaching and learning in preschool classrooms. Typically, Reggio instructors snap photos of children as they work on projects and pair those photographs with verbatim statements from the children about their process.  This "documentation" is essential to the Reggio process and results in journals for each child. We distilled the essence of this Reggio methodology into a technology-supported skyscraper construction activity, setting it apart from the larger building area in order to capture photos of visitors with time-lapse photography. These build stations allowed visitors to spend 12 uninterrupted minutes building a multi-story structure to reach a cloud, and then use a dedicated computer station to document their experience in the form of  a downloadable multimedia book.  Unlike many personalized exhibit stations which send visitors home with a URL that is visited by 1-3% of visitors, this experience had a respectable 30% rate of downloaded books, each personalized with visitors' own photos and audio narration.

A camera built into the station snaps photos once per minute during a 10-minute countdown. After visitors complete a building activity, photos taken automatically now show up in a multimedia kiosk. Both adults and children are prompted to add audio captions to a multimedia book which they can download from home. Capturing verbatim quotes from children places the emphasis on what the child is learning and expressing; this is a tenet of the Reggio approach; it .  

Displaying children's work is a fundamental part of the Reggio methodology. Here we created a display area for completed skyscrapers in front of an attractive mural, recognizing that the opportunity to display your work publicly can be very rewarding.  Rather than set up a situation in which one group's skycraper is immediately cannibalized for parts by the following group, the museum  produced enough parts to ensure that visitors' creations could be displayed until the end of the day