The Minnesota Children’s Museum and the University of St. Thomas’ Playful Learning Lab will hold their second annual Deaf Day event on Saturday, Dec. 2.

According to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Division, five out of every 1,000 children ages 3-17 in Minnesota are Deaf, deafblind or hard of hearing, compared to about two to three out of every 1,000 children nationally. Deaf Day welcomes those children and offers them a space to feel comfortable in the museum.

Senior mechanical engineering students Rabia Malik and Mellissa Ingabire, with the help of AnnMarie Thomas, director of the Playful Learning Lab, are organizing Deaf Day this year.

“The event is to welcome more families with deaf and hard of hearing students or children to the museum … it creates that bridge to welcome them and have them feel comfortable in the museum,” Ingabire said.

Ingabire came up with the idea before the first Deaf Day last year. While leading a different project at the Minnesota Children’s Museum, Ingabire said had an interaction with a parent and a deaf child that made her think more about accessibility.

“I had picked up a little bit of sign language from Metro Deaf School, I tried to use that and saw the parent pull back and let me interact with the child. After that she was very interested in knowing how I learned sign language and how I was doing this,” Ingabire said.

The Minnesota Children’s Museum is partnered with St. Thomas’s Playful Learning Lab, a research lab on campus used by many majors, focused on playful learning with children.

“A lot of activities that the Playful Learning Lab does also have something to do with the Minnesota Children’s Museum. And through that collaboration, and also the experience I had with the child was at the Minnesota Children’s Museum, it was just natural that we had to do the event there,” Ingabire said.

The activities that will be offered at Deaf Day include storytime, American Sign Language bookmark making and Squishy Circuits. Squishy Circuits are conductive playdoughs that were developed in the Playful Learning Lab by a past student, which are to help children get interested in STEM, according to Malik.

New to this year, the Minnesota Children’s Museum has a media director who is working to improve the media coverage and marketing of the event, in the hopes of drawing more attendees.

“I would expect that this year there are a lot more people because the museum has a publicist, and they’re already running ads on their websites and throughout the museum,” Ingabire said.

Malik and Ingabire said they have fond memories from Deaf Day last year and are excited about this year’s event.

“At last year’s Deaf Day (the children) were so excited and they were looking at innovative ways to use the clay that I hadn’t even thought of and it was just so exciting to see their trajectory compared to mine as an engineering student,” Malik said.

The organizers of the event create inclusive spaces for Deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

“The biggest impact is on the children who are able to come to the museum and see it is OK and feel comfortable there,” Ingabire said.

Madeline Mussay can be reached at muss3440@stthomas.edu.
Kevin Callahan can be reached at call2656@stthomas.edu.