Children's museum

[6] Their goal was to gain children's interest and "to stimulate their powers of observation and reflection" as well as to "illustrate by collections of pictures, cartoons, charts, models, maps and so on, each of the important branches of knowledge which is taught in elementary schools".

[4] Anna Billings Gallup, the museum's curator from 1904 to 1937, encouraged a learning technique that allowed children to "discover" information by themselves through touching and examining objects.

[7] In addition to emphasis on allowing interaction with objects, Gallup also encouraged learning through play.

She believed learning at the Brooklyn Children's Museum should be "pure fun", and to this end developed nature clubs, held field trips, brought live animals into the museum, and hired gallery instructors to lead children in classification games about animals, shells, and minerals.

[8] Other children's museums of the early twentieth century used similar techniques that emphasized learning through experience.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the children's museums slowly began to discard their objects in favor of more interactive exhibits.

Le Musée des Enfants in Brussels was started in 1978, inspired by Boston Children's Museum.

The Early Start Discovery Space in Wollongong, Australia opened in 2015 and was modelled on the US-styled children's museums.