27 June 2025
It has been another great week at Banting House, and with the heat wave, an excellent chance to get work done on my laptop in the comfort of an air-conditioned museum! Most of what I tackled this week was contained to Canva. To keep my own thoughts organized, I recently created a social media calendar that I can refer to everyday to know when things need to be posted and make sure everything is prepared to be posted in advance. This has been really helpful in keeping track of significant days in history related to Banting House, making sure diaversary bricks are posted on time, and having a solid plan for posting time-sensitive promotional material. With all the pre-planning I am able to do better now with the social media calendar, I have spent a good part of the week dedicated to making social media posts, but there is another programming-related project I have been working on that I am excited to finally get a chance to talk about!
One of the programming projects I have been working on for the past several weeks is putting together a Lego scavenger hunt! We are always looking for fun and educational ways to engage kids when they visit the museum, and while we do have an activity package for kids already, we wanted to add a little something more to it. These nine Lego figures will be placed in each gallery of the museum for eagle-eyed visitors to find and check off their list. On the scavenger hunt sheet, there are short blurbs for each of the figures to give a brief explanation on their significance to the life of Frederick Banting and the history of Banting House. I’m thrilled that this programming project I have been working on can finally be implemented in the museum! I spent a lot of time finding the right Lego figures, waiting for them all to get delivered, and perfecting the condensed histories on the scavenger hunt sheet to tell the stories we want both kids and their parents to learn about! Next time you’re in, see what figures you can spot!
As I said, putting together this Lego scavenger hunt took a long time, but I learned a lot about programming! It was difficult to find the right Lego figures and required a lot of cross-reference and research. Perhaps the most challenging was attempting to tell a full history in 30 words or less! It is an important skill to have as a Public Historian to be able to take complex histories and condense them down to what the public will understand and actively engage with. My boss and I went through many drafts to not only get the wording just right, but also to make sure the spacing was even because the look on the page is as important as the information on it. Overall, I am very happy with the final product that came after weeks of work! And as always, I am excited to see what I get upto next week!