CAIRO: Sitting at a table with three containers filled with water in front of me, I was presented with a task, to turn each one over. The water spilled from the first, a mug, and the second, a bottle cap. I reached to the third, a tiny, bullet-shaped plastic container, and turned it over, but not a drop was spilled.
“Because at the nano-level material become so strong that they even defy the laws of gravity,” Sara Hashem, founder and president of Discoverama, told me as she demonstrated the process of simplifying and explaining science at this emerging children’s museum.
The museum functions according to international standards, it is accredited by and a member of the International Association of Museums and the American Association of Museums. The staff are trained at the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis.
Hashem, who studied museums in the UK and Germany and is currently preparing her PhD, explained that when it comes to children, museums function in a completely different way from those catering to adults.
“A children’s museum is an interactive venue, not about the objects you go see and then leave. It’s a space where you can interact with concepts, objects and ideas. A children’s museum is an interactive play space,” she said.
Hashem was the director of the Suzanne Mubarak Children’s Museum for four years. She was responsible for spearheading the renovation of the museum, which does not exist anymore. She then decided to start a private initiative to create a children museum to serve society.
“We are creating an establishment, an institution called Discoverama, which is a children’s museum and it will lead informal education in this country,” she noted.
The first phase is a mobile museum project that will take all activities and programs to the audience.
Children’s museums need substantial capital to build, from the land and infrastructure to the exhibits. Thus, the decision was made to make it mobile.
Discoverama targets children aged 4-12 through communities, NGOs and schools.
“We know that educational programming in Egypt and education curricula are very dry, unpleasant and unappealing for the child,” said Hashem, who considers schools their main target. “We do no guarantee better grades, but we guarantee higher interest in the subject matter and that is crucial for the teacher to get the message through,” she explained.
Hashem noted that even though there are numerous informal education initiatives in Egypt, they don’t yield satisfactory results because they do not work with schools and their programs do not complement the academic curricula.
Even though the official launch of Discoverama is this month, for the past year they have been working, going to public schools mainly in the Cairo district of Heliopolis and remote villages around the country, such as Shebeen El Antar. So far they have reached more than 22,000 children.
Discoverama approaches learning differently, and for this reason it has been particularly challenging. “We are usually met with skepticism from parents, because our approach to their children is very alien to them,” explained Hashem.
On the other hand, the Discoverama staff were shocked by the lack of response the children have for undirected play.
While directed play is when you give guidelines to how the game is played and they need to abide by it, undirected play entails placing them in a situation without any directions, and they have to come up with their own play space. Children with developed creativity manage to problem solve and create their own play space.
“[The way] the parents teach them, children do not have room for decision making. They’re always confined to certain boundaries and limits. They need to abide by strict rules,” explained Hashem.
“The children have a tiny window of opportunity for expressing themselves the way they want to. Usually school tends to destroy this, but we discovered that even preschoolers suffer from the same problem.”
Discoverama employs unconventional methods in learning with the aim of getting students interested in school curricula.
