“Go Museum” Educational Programs
—— My entrepreneurship starts here
Aug. 2019 - Jan. 2020
From August 2019 to January 2020, my business partner - Lily Zhang (a former reporter for China Central Television), and I organized over ten times free in-person museum education programs (“Go Museum”) and attracted hundreds of Chinese-American families with children 6 to 10 years of age to attend.
Oct. 2019
“Plants Scavenger Hunt”
Garfield Park Conservatory
Dec. 2019
“The Secret of Ocean”
The Shedd Aquarium
Nov. 2019
“Discover the Earth Evolution”
The Field Museum
Dec. 2019
“Explore the Mysterious Nature”
Museum of Science and Industry
Nov. 2019
“European Classical Architectures”
The Art Institute of Chicago
Jan. 2020
“Chinese Lunar New Year Paper Craft Fest”
Chicago Cultural Center
When I was volunteering at The Art Institute of Chicago, some issues came to my mind…
Narrow Sphere of Parents’ Knowledge
Shortage of Museum Education in Public School
Limits of Engagement
No Time to Plan Ahead for Children’s Parents
Narrow Sphere of Parents’ Knowledge
For children’s parents, they may be in proficient in their professional settings, however if their children raise some questions like what the pointillism is while facing to the panting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in Art Institute or how the tornado forms in MSI, they probably don’t know exact answers.
Limits of Engagement
Except the MSI, there are not enough interactions of exhibits for children to engage with at most of museums in Chicago. Children can be very easy to lose patience in visiting, therefore, they need museum educators to constantly motivate their interests, encourage them think of exhibits alongside of children.
Shortage of Museum Education in Public School
Public schools indeed have educational activities in some museums, but not enough! It all comes down to, no sufficient budgets to largely support K1 - 4 students tour every semester or even every year at all. From my observation, public school teachers in K1 - 4 students tour just like “babysitter”. To discuss some exhibits? Sorry, no such thing!
No Time to Plan Ahead for Children’s Parents
Most of Chinese-Amercian parents have to work on weekdays, time for them is a precious thing. They do not energy to do the museum research such as the popular exhibits or floor plan after work. Besides, Chicago museums stand in extensive grounds, most of families usually get exhausted and just glanced over things hurriedly in one hour.
We are the forerunner who discovered the market of museum education for children 6 - 10 years of age in Chinese-American families at Chicago.
Market
Chinese-American families value education. They are willing to invest children in all kinds of supplemental education such as instruments, gymnastics, and STEM competitions. For K1-4 children, museums are the best places to let them find their interests.
High Consumption of Children’s Education in Chinese Americans
As volunteers, we have the benefit of getting free admission to all of Chicago’s museums, which can significantly reduce our costs while doing museum research. That role also helps us reach some teaching supplies from the Department of Education in certain museums.
Accessible to Museum Resource
Our team only has two people, me and my business partner - Lily. The small-sized team make us communicate extremely efficiently, from preparation to execution, and every plan we made was landed quickly. Lily is a former reporter for China Central Television with 12-year working experience, which practiced her charming and persuasive rhetoric that can be used for maintaining the relationship between our team and families. For me, my contagious enthusiasm and playful spirit could easily let me be part of children, to teach them. Also, my academic journey helps me conduct user experience research to better understand families’ needs for exploiting more attractive programs.
Best Team
We believe a great product needs to be polished precisely, to get feedback, and to do iterations.
If pushing for commercialization too soon, it will eventually block our potential customers
For this reason, we conducted multiple questionnaires on every museum program and inquired about some information on children’s extracurricular activities from all kinds of parents of different ages, professionals, incomes, and marital statuses.
Advertising for us is super luxurious since we don’t get any profit so far in programs. Instead, we use WeChat to find our potential customers.
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WeChat is a free Chinese instant messaging app like WhatsApp in US.
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Nearly all Chinese-American families are using WeChat every day. WeChat supports up to 500 participant group chats, which makes our program information spread surprisingly fast.
In only two months, we have received more than two hundred families' inquiries, without any cost.
I illustrated this process to help you understand how it works.
1.
We sent program posters to multiple Chicago parent group chats, with topics, times, and locations.
2.
Some parents who may be interested in our program scanned the QR code on that poster and were pulled into the group that we established.
3.
In our own group, we explained details of our program to these parents, they are our first customer.
These summarized procedures illustrated how we designed and implemented the in-person museum program. Here is one example.
“European Classical Architectures”
We tried to gather all useful information related to our topic as much as possible.
Books and the museum's official website are our primary reference sources due to their high reliability, sometimes we would refer to some children’s books to get some new ideas of pedagogy. This process usually takes us 3 days.
We went to museum and explored collections which can be used in teaching process.
For example, in the European Architectures topic, we picked few museum interior ornaments that have greek order elements such as Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.
Some antique vessels can reveal ancient greek costumes.
Some paintings which illustrated ancient Roman architecture such as Baths of Caracalla, Circo Massimo, Colosseum.
Chariot Race. Jean Leon Gerome, French, 1824-1904.
The second purpose is monitoring the visitor traffic at specific showroom.
We wish our children have enough space to do some learning activities in the museum without disturbing other visitors, so it requires showrooms that have low traffic as well as inside collections matching our topic as much as possible. We typically do on-site research 2 times per event.
As we use WeChat to promote our program, an easy-to-read and fast-to-load poster is necessary for sharing on mobile phones.
Because the program is free, the responses always be overwhelmed, so we decided to follow the “first come, first served” rule. And we made confirmation with these families 2 days before the event.
Registration is open after the publicity of the poster. For better performance, we only took up to 10 families in each event.
The poster for this program, written in Chinese.
Making demonstrations always be the best way to enlighten children.
For example, I used toy bricks and paper to illustrate why ancient greek architecture cannot be built too large with many columns needed, compared with roman arcade buildings. Next, I encouraged children to find differences of strength between ancient greek and roman architectures through hands-on brick-building activities.
Children are doing activities in the Impressionism exhibition.
We tried to make all questions scattered in all our teaching segments so that children could continuously engage with the learning process. And we deliberately labeled every question’s difficulty with 1-5 starts on the quizzes, all K1-4 children can freely choose questions they want to answer based at their own pace with no pressure.
Quizzes serve an important role in our museum education program.
All quizzes design files have been corrupted due to transferring data to a new Mac, this screenshot is not related to this example
After everything is done, we went to the museum again and got familiar with teaching steps on particular spots.
Questionnaires written in Chinese
Promotion Channel is Narrow
Since the program is free, we couldn’t get profit from our devotion, which restricts us to advertise in multiple channels. But we are pleased that the reputation of our programs was spreading fast from one parent’s mouth to another.
Commercialization is Difficult
The museum admission fee is not cheap, especially for the Shedd. If we commercialize our programs, the parents not only pay for our service but also the museum tickets, this high combo cost prevents many families from signing our programs.
Cost is High
Developing new programs consumes lots of time currently. If we expand the scale or accelerate the program development, the labor cost still is a question.
We discovered this market, and until now, the market is still there. But facing the irresistible global pandemic, our museum education programs have been paused since Mar. 2020. After considerable research, we changed our primary business into e-learning education and got successful commercial results at the initial stage, please check the next page for more details.
