BENTONVILLE -- More than 25,000 students experienced The Scott Family Amazeum through its first-year "Unfield Trips" program, according to museum officials.
The program launched in October, less than three months after the interactive children and family museum opened in July. The last school group came through May 22. There were 25,674 students in more than 350 visits during that time.
The Scott Family Amazeum
Amazeum is a hands-on, interactive museum for children and families located at the intersection of Northeast J Street and Museum Way in Bentonville.
Experiences include a climbable tree canopy, indoor cave and nearly an acre of outdoor space.
For more information, visit www.amazeum.org.
Source: Amazeum
More than 80 percent of the students were from Benton and Washington counties. The rest came from other Arkansas counties, Kansas and Oklahoma, according to a news release.
"The field trip experience at Amazeum is not like a traditional field trip experience," said Mindy Porter, director of education. "The idea of calling it an Unfield Trip is just to get the message out that this is something different."
An Unfield Trip can be customized for age groups and teachers' preferences, Porter said. The trip isn't a guided or an unprogrammed visit.
Springdale's Jones Elementary School second-graders during a December visit took turns shopping, running a register and stocking shelves in a kid-sized Neighborhood Market exhibit sponsored by Wal-Mart, teacher Ashley Kasnicka said Friday. The exhibit featured sections with play pieces for dairy, produce and meat. After shopping, the children realized someone had to return food to the shelves.
The Homestead Cabin and Farm exhibit provided a wire tree for children to pick play apples, take them to the cabin for "cooking" and return them to the tree for others to pick apples, Kasnicka said. They also enjoyed collecting eggs from a play chicken coop.
"My students loved it," Kasnicka said. "Coming from a school of poverty, a lot of our students would never get to experience something like that."
Many parents would want to take their children but are limited by money, time, transportation and a lack of awareness of the Amazeum, she said.
The experience gave the children practice with sharing and working together, Kasnicka said. Kasnicka had a short time to prepare for the visit but thought the market exhibit would tie in with lessons on economics, while the farm house would fit in with social studies.
Amazeum staff learned a lot, too, in the program's pilot year, specifically the museum's experience works differently for different audiences.
The family's experience has different goals and expectations than student and teacher experiences do, and a first-grader's experience is going to be different than an eighth-grader's experience, Porter said.
Students from preschool through high school participated in Unfield Trips, though most groups were between kindergarten and fourth grade, she said.
Unfield Trips were modified and adjusted as officials observed and learned the different nuances of each group. Lessons learned this year will help formalize a lot of procedures and activities for coming years, Porter said.
Being accessible to all in the community was one of the "strongest, most prominent goals" when Amazeum opened, and hosting Unfield Trips was one way to make it easy for children to have an experience at the museum, said Molly Rawn, director of development and communications.
"We didn't want any barriers to their visit," she said, whether they were financial, regarding transportation or perception as some families may think a museum might not be for them.
A $327,000 Wal-Mart Foundation grant allowed the Benton and Washington county students to visit for free and help establish the program.
Students came on a first-come, first-served basis, museum officials said. Interested educators would call to book a time.
Officials are still working out financial details for the 2016-17 Unfield Trip program, and an announcement will be made later this summer regarding when reservations can start to be made.
NW News on 06/18/2016