People First

PEOPLE FIRST is a mobility project for the Explora staff co-funded by the European Erasmus+ Programme. The project aims at improving the Museum’s offerings for families, teachers, and companies, through training courses and events in Europe.

PEOPLE FIRST is an opportunity for growth and innovation for Explora, brought about by the need to improve its staff’s knowledge for an adult public, which has been growing steadily since the Museum’s opening in 2001. This includes:

• families, who share their children’s experience visiting the Museum and attending workshops. Workshops are based on an informal approach, hands-on and learning by doing, and are often inspired by tinkering. Tinkering is a teaching method that helps children learn and expand skills through construction and invention. Activities are aimed at combining science, engineering, arts and design, promoting the ability to investigate, outline and analyse information, stimulating thinking ability, creativity and encouraging cognitive, physical, and emotional involvement;
• students and teachers, who attend educational visits, training courses and special events, also based on the recent education reform, aiming at improving skills with extracurricular and informal activities;
• companies, which not only support financially the Museum’s activities, but also provide technology, know-how, experience needed to develop educational projects, with a view to corporate social responsibility. These companies, which represent the most recent and fastest growing adult public, are more and more interested in hands-on and learning by doing, an approach typical of the children’s museums, to offer their employees workshops and creative activities focusing on team-building, in line with the new corporate welfare trends.

The general objective is to help refresh the Museum staff’s skills in order to: improve their English and allow them to better interact with an international target; combine transversal skills with specific skills to innovate the offerings for families, schools and teachers; transfer the schools’ best practices; refresh workshops for families with innovations from science, technology, maker movement and informal approach, learning by doing and hands-on; roll out new workshops or other activities, including creative/team-building sessions for companies.

The project involves a minimum of 10 participants from the Museum’s permanent staff, with 13 training courses and events in 9 European countries.

The expected impact is measured on:

• single participants: improving linguistic skills, job satisfaction and proactiveness; increasing the level of sharing and strengthening team-building abilities; increasing the ability to turn inputs into outputs for the industry, the whole structure and target groups, to create synergies in order to develop new activities for the adult target.
• whole structure: internationalisation, strengthening or creation of new networks; developing new, innovative and complementary offerings, also in view of the expansion project “Explora Grows”.
• target groups: improving the use of all the Museum’s areas, including the outdoor area, the bookshop and the Cooking Lab; increasing and improving activities for families, including camps; repeating school visits, training courses and events for teachers; increasing activities for companies.

PEOPLE FIRST is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union