Public and Youth Programs at the Children's Museum

Over the past few weeks, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis Museum Apprentices have been hard at work creating their stands for Lemonade Day on Saturday, May 19th. To start this project, we divided them up into four groups and gave each group these challenges:

-Create a lemonade stand that is themed after an exhibit or icon in the museum.

-Create a unique recipe for your lemonade stand that will make it stand (ha, pun!) out from all the rest.

-Design an educational activity  that will enhance your stand and teach visitors about the icon or exhibit you are featuring.

-Meet with members of the Children's Museum Marketing Team to create a brand and really cool signs that will immediately cause lemonade cravings.

The challenges were set, the MAPs accepted, and they have been tirelessly creating lemonade stand gold for the big day.  Along the way, they sharpened their teambuilding skills, became experts of the lemonade culinary arts, and practiced their skills at creating fun and educational programming for children and families. They constructed their stands and spent hours in the test kitchen perfecting their lemonade recipes for the big day, and have arrived at the perfect lemon to sugar ratios. Millions of ideas were tossed around, and only the strong survived. What is left are four lemonade stands, four activities, and four recipes designed by the MAPs for the tastebuds and eager minds of our visitors.

I can't tell you all of the details, but I CAN tell you that you can expect to see some pirates, robots, dinosaurs, and explosions of color. Join us on Saturday, May 19th to buy lemonade to help support the Museum Apprentice Program and see what these amazing youth have been creating over the past few weeks. Learn more about the Museum Apprentice Program.

If you have been to a public event at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, you have probably noticed a whole gaggle of teenagers wearing black shirts helping you at table top activities, character appreances, or just being there to lend helpful information. Have you ever wondered who they are? Or what they do?

This black-shirted army of champions is better known as  the Museum Apprentice Program, or MAP for short. The MAPs are 13-18 year olds who help out at public events and family programs; however, being a MAP is so. much. more.

Every year the MAPs complete 2 or 3 projects that are related to the exhibits and create programs for the public. You may have recognized some of their work if you've ever scanned a QR code at one of the major icons in the museum. They actually created Wikipedia entries for those icons! In the summer of 2011, they traded their wikihats for shovels and sunscreen and became connoisseurs of archaeology. They used their expertise to create and facilitate activities as the MAP Summer Archaeology Festival. This spring they will be creating their own lemonade stands and activities and selling lemonade for national Lemonade Day.

To learn about the brainstorming process and how to create programs from exhibits, the MAPs spent their last meeting with a guest LEGO® builder, where they learned how to take their LEGO brick building to a new level. They built mansions, dungeons, cats, landscaping, and more, all in a quest to brainstorm future programming possibilities related to exhibits.

Keep your eyes out for their next big project on Lemonade Day, May 19, when they will reveal their lemonade stands.  I'll keep you updated on their progress so that you can be with them every sweet and sour step of their lemonade way.