“I reckon we need to learn from grandmothers. Grandmothers are awesomely effective museum learning-facilitators. They don’t act as if they know it all, or even as if they ought to know it all.

Grandmothers are wonderfully, openly interested in what the child is doing. They are not anxious that the child should be ‘learning’ more, like mothers are. They are not driven to conceal their own ignorance with obsessive label-reading, like fathers are. Best of all, Grandmothers know how to ask Dopey Questions…

‘What does that one do, dear?’ ‘Does it? Really? Go on then.’ ‘OOH, that was good! What if you do it again?’ ‘I wonder what would happen if we twisted that thing over there…?’ ‘Oh, is THAT why it happens? Can you tell me about it?’ It seems so hard to train people to ask genuinely open questions.

Grandmothers support and empower, relying on the exhibition’s own inbuilt explanations. The most skillfully formulated open questions sound like Dopey
Questions.”

–Ian Russell
Interactive Science, Ltd.

Of course, grandfathers can also be pretty good at asking Dopey Questions too…