Building Character Through Play: How Museums Can Inspire Strengths That Last a Lifetime
A major philanthropic foundation has recently launched a multi-million-dollar initiative to explore how children's museums can promote positive character traits—like kindness, grit, and empathy—through exhibitions, programs, and community partnerships. This is an amazing opportunity, especially since children's museums have long provided play-based experiences that inspire curiosity and a love of learning.
However, the challenge of building character traits in a museum exhibit should not be underestimated. Higher-level modes of behavior like empathy and courage are difficult for children to integrate into their sense of self and to apply to their daily lives. Character traits aren't acquired through formal lessons. They require lived experiences.
As designers of large, adventurous climbing structures, we're deeply interested in how these structures help cultivate good character. In every climber we design, we create opportunities for children to muster their courage, test their independence, quench their curiosity, strengthen their grit, and practice patience. Over years, we have developed some general guidelines about how to make a good character-building experience, which we describe below.
What Are Character Strengths?
Character strengths are positive traits or virtues that everyone possesses to varying degrees. The VIA (Values in Action) Institute has identified 24 universal character strengths, including perseverance, optimism, kindness, and curiosity. These strengths are crucial for building self-worth, evaluating the world around us, and responding to life’s challenges.
Ingredients for a Successful Character-Building Exhibit
Think back to a pivotal childhood experience, like climbing your first tall tree, staying home alone for the first time, or taking your first airplane ride. These moments likely involved unfamiliar settings or experiences with uncertain outcomes.
Similarly, a character-building exhibit needs to encourage visitors to tap into their inner strengths and navigate new and unfamiliar situations. Easy, familiar settings don’t offer the same opportunity to stretch personal boundaries or develop new skills. A character-building exhibit should create situations that mirror the kind of situations that trigger character development in real life. Such experiences often include the following:
1. A Transportive World-Setting
The exhibit should immerse visitors in a world vastly different from their everyday environment. This could include unique, visually stimulating surfaces—on the ceiling, walls, and floor—that evoke a sense of being in an unknown time or place. This alternative universe should present challenges that invite exploration and discovery.
2. Success and Failure Outcomes
Children's interactions with the exhibit and with each other should have the capacity to produce a variety of outcomes, ranging from those that are successful to those that are disappointing, and that are felt as failures. These different outcomes need to be linked to children's performance in such a way that when the character trait being encouraged is evoked, success is produced. This establishes a positive feedback loop to incentivize the character trait.
While it might seem insensitive or harmful to create a possibility of failure, this is a crucial part of character-building. Character traits aren't just good in the abstract. To develop them, children must understand that these traits have real-world consequences, and that living successfully requires good character. In the context of a character-building exhibit, the bad consequences associated with failure can be carefully calibrated, so they aren't as harsh as what the child would encounter in real world circumstances.
3. Iterative Practice
To cultivate some character traits, such as perseverance and meticulousness, it's helpful to develop an exhibit with the capacity for iterative improvement. When an exhibit provides the potential to try again and again, and to gradually improve one's performance, this activates all those character traits related to determination and foresight that we need as adults to manage our lives successfully not just in the present, but into a better future.
4. Collaborative Scenarios
For some character traits such as empathy, patience and kindness, it is helpful for exhibits to include a shared larger objective or mission, which two or more children can pursue together. Each child takes on a part of the mission, and must coordinate that part with other parts, taken on by other children. Such missions should be designed so that they can only be accomplished through collaboration, and in doing so, they provide a powerful prompt to activate this particular collection of character traits.
Beyond Character Strengths: Building a Purposeful Life
Character strengths aren’t just for their own sake—they are the tools for living a meaningful and fulfilling life. In a museum setting, younger children might develop these strengths by exercising their agency, while older visitors will focus more on how to apply these strengths in real-world scenarios.
What can these strengths help a child achieve in the exhibit—and, by extension, in life? The goal is to connect actions with outcomes—outcomes that are chosen, strived for, and meaningful. This approach aims to offer visitors opportunities to be purposeful, not just skilled. By blending character development with skill-building, the exhibit can provide a model for a life that’s not just about doing, but about doing something worthwhile.