Interactive Museums - New Spaces for the Education of Children and Adolescents

Abstract

The discussion of the importance of museums, their status, their functions, and the transformations taking place in these areas has been going on for a long time. The changes taking place in postmodernity mean that museums will not escape new challenges and will be transformed more and more, becoming not only a place for the reception of art or other artifacts but also spaces for lifelong learning, enabling the development of individual passions and fascinations of visitors, places of meeting with other people and dialogue. The purpose of this article is to highlight the role that interactive museums can play in the process of educating children and adolescents to function in the digital society of the 21st century. Referring to the new culture of learning based on the idea of STEAM and the assumptions of constructivism and connectivism, the article attempts to analyze the category that interactive museums represent, suggesting, based on the example of Tokyo’s TeamLab and Poland’s Funzeum, selected motives that can make an interactive museum a space for experiencing and learning. The art-based research used structuralist narratology, focusing on qualitative analysis of the content and forms of interactive communication of interactive exhibitions in selected museums. The results of the analysis show that interactivity has revolutionized the museum space, arousing curiosity in the visitor and creating new opportunities for multisensory learning, individual experiences, interpretation, and deciphering the meaning of artifacts.