Playful Experiments: Gendered Performances in a Children's Museum

Abstract

While initiatives to popularise science for children and young people are on the rise, we know little about how children in practice interact with scientific objects in children's museums. Ethnographic research in a Viennese museum, focusing on children's interaction with an apparatus aimed to teach children about the mixing of colours, reveals the complexity and multifariousness of such practices. Imaginaries of mystery and witchcraft are inscribed in the object, while inscriptions of laboratory practices are also present. The ways in which children de-scribe this object resemble the production of experimental scientific knowledge: they try, contextualise, question, comment and reflect on the technological arrangement. Their practices and scientific performances integrate societal questions, applications, norms and values when they, for example, criticise the arrangement, perform polluting the Danube or sell coloured drinks. Doing science also means performing gender in this context: boys involve themselves more playfully and directly in the technology than girls, who remain more sceptical. Whereas the former are quick to play and invent stories, the latter take a different approach, commenting on and criticising the object. Despite the museum's efforts to equally address and involve boys and girls, the children's usage of the object differs.