Design Your Own Museum
Year 7, your task is to take on the role of a museum curator (someone who builds up and presents a collection of objects) and design your own museum about a topic of your choosing.
Before you start to plan your exhibition, think about a museum you have visited and reflect about what was good about it, and what you could improve about it.
If you have not visited a museum before, follow the link below to take a virtual tour of museums from around the world!
What was the name and location of the museum?
What was the museum about?
What did you like about any of the displays?
What did you dislike about any of the displays?
How was the exhibition laid out?
What made the displays interesting?
Planning your exhibition
Mind map some ideas about your exhibition.
What is the theme?
What specific areas of history do you want to explore?
Who is your audience? (It could be children, families, adults, schools etc.)
Decide who you are creating the exhibition for and how you could aim it at them.
The Challenge
Now that you have done lots of planning, your task is to design your own museum exhibition. This can be about any topic of history that you are interested in; it can be a topic that we have studied in school or anything else! It is up to you how you present your work.
You could…
Use an A3 piece of paper to draw and label your exhibition display.
Create a PowerPoint presentation to create a virtual museum display (any other fancy computer programme is fine!)
Use materials around the house such as shoe or cereal boxes to build your museum exhibition.
We spoke to the team behind the Ironbridge Gorge museums and they gave us some top tips for creating a museum to share with you…
Encourage your visitors to read panels by making the text easy to read:
Use short sentences and paragraphs.
Think about accessibility – what colours are easiest to read? Will you offer text in languages other than English? Will you create a children’s guide to the museum?
Colour illustrations make a panel more interesting to read.
Research is important - people trust what they read in a museum so it has to be accurate.
Displaying Objects:
Your choice of objects is possibly the most important part of the exhibition – people are drawn to look at them and then will read the information panels.
What objects will help you to tell your story? Choose a story that you know you can find objects for.
How many objects will you use? It isn’t a good idea to overload a case with objects – sometimes the most impressive displays have one item per case. Think about how many display cases you would like to have in your exhibition and how many objects per case.
Remember to arrange the case so that the objects can be seen clearly; you can use little blocks to raise some things up, or fix smaller items to a board that sits on the back of the case.
Visitor Engagement:
As well as telling an important story, your exhibition should be engaging. Partly this is done by having interesting objects and text panels, but there are other things you could add to the exhibition too.
Interactive experiences – games, quizzes, etc.
Think of some of the things you have enjoyed at a museum, and also consider different age groups. Adults like to play too!
Links to opportunities to learn more – books, articles, other museums.
Fun facts – visitors like to laugh in museums. A word of caution: not all subjects are appropriate to add the ‘fun’ element; make sure your story is suitable for this.
Most of all…enjoy the challenge! Research something that interests you and be creative!
Your History Teacher has set up a Google Classroom where you can access your own copy of the 'Design Your Own Museum' project book.
Click here to find your class code. You may be prompted to sign in with your School Google ID to access the list of class codes.