Luminous Lifeforms & Spinning Spaceships – Creating Interactive Planetarium Shows for Children Under 6

Presentation theme: educational advancements in planetariums

Over the past decade, We the Curious has offered two Planetarium-Shows for children under 6 and their families – Space Explorers and Rocketship Adventure. 

Creating and presenting these live, interactive, presenter-led shows has taught my team and I a great deal about what works and what doesn’t when targeting planetarium content to this age group. 

We learned what aspects the children enjoy the most and how this differs from what their adults enjoy. We learned how to balance time spent on space content with time spent on audience interaction. We learned how to cater for returning visitors and their expectations. And we learned how to use puppets in a planetarium. 

We wanted to make a new show for audiences aged under 6, so we could apply these learnings from the very start of a show’s development. The result was Spin the Spaceship – a live, presenter-led Planetarium-Show that offers children under 6 and their families the chance to explore the Solar System in a fun, interactive, and meaningful way. 

During this show, audience members are invited to press a big, green button and »spin the spaceship«. This will randomly choose a destination in the Solar System for the audience to investigate. Together, the audience and the presenter search for a home for Blurgle Wurgle – our bespoke alien puppet, created in collaboration with a local puppet-maker. 

Almost every decision made by us in the creation of Spin the Spaceship – and in the creation of Blurgle Wurgle - was based on something we had learned from years of presenting interactive Planetarium-Shows for children under 6 and their families. 

In this presentation I would like to share these learnings with the global planetarium community. I would like to explain how we applied these learnings and reveal if the show was a success.

Image © Arena Berlin