Children's informal learning at an interactive science centre

About 150 Scottish primary school children, aged between eight and 11, were interviewed during a visit to an interactive science centre in order to assess how and what children learned from their visit. The results showed that children engaged in problem solving by drawing analogies with familiar everyday situations. Children also seemed to combine experiential knowledge gained from interaction with exhibits and their everyday knowledge in order to create new understanding. Prior knowledge was shown to be important in enabling pupils to construct plausible hypotheses about exhibits. It is concluded that interactive science centres have great potential to develop as a resource within the primary science curriculum.