Based on a developmentally-specifc sequence of activity areas that address the National Geography Standards, various activities will be designed for different age groups, ranging from 3-12 year olds.

The three main exhibit areas are:
1. Building Blocks
2. My Maps, My World
3. Inside the Mapper’s Mind

In addition to these three exhibit areas, the Map Commons is a central space for community events, sharing content, or just getting a bite to eat.

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Building Blocks

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Building Blocks includes activities that explore basic concepts:

• what is a map?
• color and symbols
• directions (north/south/east/west)
• location (longitude/latitude)
• marking a trail
• scale
• layers and maps

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Examples:

Pegs
Visitors can create or follow a path through an environment by inserting oversize pushpins into spaces in a simple coordinate grid. Explain the concepts of coordinates, longitude and latitude and direction.

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Map Sandwich
Screens show visitors maps of their community with layers of information that can be changed.

Visitors can make their own types of maps by adding or subtracting layers of geographic, natural, political or statistical data on top of one another.
Allow visitors to see for themselves how different kinds of maps can emphasize different subjects, or be used for different purposes.

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My Maps, My World

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My Maps, My World focuses on allowing children to make personal maps. It includes some interactives but focuses on activity areas

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Examples


Discovery Box
A Visitor ‘discovers’ the land inside a box by reaching in and exploring with their hands.

Visitors build a mental map of a modeled physical space, while seeing the physical map of that space drawn on the screen as their hands discover the space inside.

Mapmaking Station

1. use a pen device for input into a digital screen, create a blank grid form with a few universal symbols and icons kids can use to add to their own lines – and which appeal to ages from 4 to 11
2. choose your bedroom, you house, your street, your neighborhood, your journey to school, summer camp, a favorite park, a place in a book or from a tv show or from your imagination
3. the drawing is projected on a large enough screen (not a display), where a few people can easily look at the drawing, kids can collaborate on a map (have extra pens?), parents can work with kids, or kids can work on their own

When a map is finished, you can choose to send it to the Locatomator database and/or print out a copy and take it home.

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Inside the Mapper’s Mind

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Inside the Mapper’s Mind introduces some of the more abstract and high-level messages that form the core goal of the narrative.

• Maps are stories, mapmakers are storytellers

• How and why mapmakers make choices – cartographers take kids through their own processes and show them how it’s done – both through workshops and a permanent video exhibit

• Look at maps from different culture, at different times in history – the earth changes, our neighborhoods and cities change, so do our maps

• Look at maps of the same place, created for different purposes/by different mapmakers

• Introduce different kinds of maps: space maps, internet maps, brain maps, DNA maps

Since the museum is mobile, activity areas will use its journey around the world as an example of mapping concepts and activities. The museum collects information from and about the people who visit the museum and the places it visits, to create a new kind of living, growing map, in the same way explorers traveled the world and created maps of places they discovered.

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Map Commons

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The Map Commons is a central gathering area framed by three interactive walls that echo the building block concept and the personal/local/global trajectory of understanding how we relate to geography and other people.

The screens merge the dynamic information gathered in the museum, in the specific community we’re in and around the planet, gathered through the web site and Locatomator interface

• Large screens that display a variety of maps/images with the location, name, age of its creator

• Touch screen interface which triggers audio and video clips, shows whether there are other maps of the same place/same key words that can be selected to be shown next to a particular map, can be overlaid, etc.