The present study is structured on three levels and is conducted by the interdisciplinary collaboration of five researchers (Museologist, Pedagogists and a Theatre-educator).

The first level concerns the pilot implementation of a one-day workshop for postgraduate students to produce educational toys in the Ethnological Museum of Thrace in Greece (http://emthrace.org).

Specifically, the workshop includes teaching based on theory and empirical activities of the modules "play", "educational play and educational toys", "play in the museum context" and the presentation of the "Play Pyramid" model of Kudrowitz and Wallace (2009), which is applied in industry and design education settings, as a means of exploring the play value of toys and producing new ideas.

The aim of the workshop  for the students is to acquire the essential knowledge and skills to design and create, in small groups or pairs, their own educational toys inspired by the museum artifacts and incorporate them into the museum context, taking into account the special characteristics of the informal education settings and in particular the museum and its public.

The second level of the study concerns the assessment of the workshop instruction in relation to its effectiveness in producing educational toys by the students in the context of the museum. For this purpose we decided to use the Lesson Study model (LS), which is characterized by the elements of cooperation, reflection and feedback (Rekalidou, Karadimitriou, Moumoulidou, 2014) and focuses on both the modification of personal theories of teachers in relation to the implementation of educational practices and to the general improvement of their teaching practices (Marble, 2007). According to the LS model, a group of educators participate actively in the design of teaching, determining the learning objective and the plan to achieve it. Then someone or some members of the group implement teaching while the others observe and record data of the teaching process. This material is subject to reflection and feedback  after the instruction, which is redesigned and implemented again, possibly from another / other teacher/s and possibly in a different classroom (Fernandez, Cannon, Chokshi, 2003. Lewis, Perry, Murata, 2006).

The third level concerns the assessment of students` learning experience by utilizing for the purpose of our research three of the five categories of the Generic Learning Outcomes model (GLOs), which was developed as a tool for museums, libraries and archives to demonstrate the outcomes and impact of users’ learning experiences (see: University of Leicester, The Generic Learning Outcomes - Measuring Learning Impact in Museums).

The study is in progress and the initial questions which will help us assess the effectiveness of the workshop instruction and the learning experience of the postgraduate students are the following:

1.  Did they manage to integrate elements of learning on how to design and produce educational toys in the museum seτting; What are these elements and how did they integrate them?

1.1. Which of the above elements are relevant to the following three categories of the GLOs model? 

a) Knowledge and understanding

b) Skills

c) Enjoyment, inspiration and creativity

2. Are there any elements that have been taught in the workshop but are not exploited by the students? What are these; What are the possible explanations for this?

3. What difficulties did students face, both in the theoretical and empirical part of the workshop?

4. To what extent is the teaching approach of the workshop related to all the above?

Fernandez, C., Cannon, J., & Chokshi, S. (2003). A US–Japan lesson study collaboration reveals critical lenses for examining practice. Teaching and teacher education, 19(2), 171-185. Kudrowitz, B. M., & Wallace, D. R. (2009). The play pyramid: A play classification and ideation tool for toy design. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 3(1), 36-56. Lewis, C., Perry, R., & Murata, A. (2006). How should research contribute to instructional improvement? The case of lesson study. Educational researcher, 35(3), 3-14. Marble, S. (2007). Inquiring into teaching: Lesson study in elementary science methods. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 18(6), 935-953. Rekalidou G., Karadimitriou K., Moumoulidou M. (2014). Application of Lesson Study with students. Collaboration, reflection and feedback. Hellenic Journal of Research in Education, 1, (3), 5-28, http://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/hjre/article/view/8935. Web pages: Ethnological Museum of Thrace – Greece: http://emthrace.org The Generic Learning Outcomes - Measuring Learning Impact in Museums, University of Leicester: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/rcmg/projects/the-generic-learning-outcomes