Engaging Families at the Kempton Steam Museum

 

Sponsor: The Kempton Steam Museum
Sponsor Liaison: Samantha Gore, Matt Guenigault, David Lawrie
Student Team: Teodor Hellgren, Jessica Peets, Kent Simmons, Max Williams
Abstract: The Kempton Steam Museum – home to two of the world’s largest triple-expansion steam engines that pumped London’s drinking water until 1980 – is working to increase their annual visitation by improving their family-friendly offerings. We explored strategies to increase engagement by researching best practices in developing family-friendly spaces, evaluating the relative family-friendliness of the Kempton Steam Museum, and iteratively developing and testing prototypes of interactive exhibits. We found that simple, physical exhibits are especially effective in engaging a wide audience. We provided recommendations for the Kempton Steam Museum to refine our prototypes and improve the visitor experience to increase the number of new and returning guests.
Link:

Final Report: Engaging Families at the Kempton Steam Museum

Final Presentation: Engaging Families at the Kempton Steam Museum

Supplemental Materials: Engaging Families at the Kempton Steam Museum

Executive Summary

Introduction:

Museums function as vital educational institutions, offering opportunities to explore history, science, technology, and art. The Kempton Steam Museum preserves two of the world’s largest triple‑expansion engines: The SirWilliamPrescott and LadyBessiePrescott Engines, which each pumped over 19 million gallons of drinking water to London every day until 1980. In 2004, the Kempton Steam Museum opened its doors on the site of the former pumping station. Despite its industrial significance, the museum only sees ~4,000 visitors per year, with a goal of increasing this to 20,000 in the next five years. Our work builds off a previous project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which identified two primary challenges: limited interactive opportunities and a demographic skew towards visitors who are “over 40, white British, and male” (Powell et al. 2024). The Kempton Steam Museum aims to increase their annual visitation and achieve museum accreditation by meeting the standards set out in the Kids in Museums Manifesto, a guide for museums to make their space more accessible for a family audience.

Methodology

The goal of our project was to explore strategies for increasing family engagement with the Kempton Steam Museum. To complete our goal, we developed three objectives:

  1. Evaluate best practices in the development of family-friendly interactives.
  2. Assess the family-friendliness of the Kempton Steam Museum based on the guidelines found in the Kids in Museums Manifesto.
  3. Develop a set of family-friendly interactive exhibits for the Kempton Steam Museum.

We adopted a mixed-methods approach to fulfill these objectives, which were approved by WPI’s Institutional Review Board under protocol IRB-25-0594.

Objective 1:

Evaluate best practices in developing family-friendly interactives We visited and conducted interviews with five museums in London and one in the United States to identify best practices in developing family-friendly exhibits. In the United States we visited the Samuel Slater Experience; in London we toured the London Museum of Water & Steam, the Postal Museum, the London Transport Museum, the London Pumphouse Museum and the London Canal Museum.

Objective 2:

Assess Kempton using the Kids in Museums Manifesto We used the Kids in Museums Manifesto self-assessment checklist to score the Kempton Steam Museum, the four London museums we interviewed, and the Pumphouse Museum on their relative family-friendliness. We used the results to benchmark the Kempton Steam Museum and identify areas of strength and opportunity in improving their family-friendliness.

Objective 3:

Develop and test interactive prototypes Based on our research in objective 1, we created three interactive exhibit prototypes.

  1. Welcome video: A three-minute film in which volunteer Samantha Gore explains how water travels from the River Thames to central London.
  2. Piston-cylinder assembly: A scale model of a simple piston-cylinder assembly that visitors build and crank by hand to understand the basic mechanics of an engine.
  3. Matching game: A model of each component of the water purification process, laid out in no particular order, where participants attempt to match a number to the order of each element in the process. We tested these prototypes at the Kempton Steam Museum during the April 12-13, 2025 Steaming Weekend. We observed how families interacted with our prototypes and debriefed afterwards with adults. We developed and used a qualitative observation checklist to measure engagement with each of our prototypes. We used visitor feedback to iterate on our prototypes and deliver a set of interactives to the Kempton Steam Museum.

Figure 1: Digital Video Prototype

Findings & recommendations

Best Practices in Developing Family-Friendly Museums

From our six interviews and museum visits, we drew the following conclusions:

  1. Hands-on, interactive, easy to use, and durable exhibits work best in family-friendly museums. Physical exhibits are preferred over digital exhibits because they are unique and tangible.
  2. “Family play areas” improve visitor experiences. Museums can benefit from creating dedicated child play-zones where adults can relax while kids play and engage with the museum’s stories.
  3. Museums can work around space constraints by removing repetitive or less engaging exhibits and thinking outside the box to use space effectively, for example by utilizing vertical space.

The current state of family-friendliness at the Kempton Steam Museum

Based on the Kids in Museums Manifesto, we determined that The Kempton Steam Museum performs moderately well in overall family-friendliness, but remains last overall among the museums we evaluated. They are welcoming and economically accessible; however, they have an opportunity to increase their community engagement, communication, and better address variety in family composition. Full results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Kids in Museums Manifesto self-assessment checklist results

Recommendations for increasing Kempton’s family-friendliness

  1. Welcome: We recommend that Kempton create a dedicated play zone for visitors, which would provide children with a place to roam while parents relax. This play space should incorporate scaled down, interactive models of the engines.
  2. Accessibility: We recommend that Kempton add a café menu to their website so families can plan their day at the museum and plan ahead for their meals.
  3. Ease and comfort: We recommend that Kempton increase the comfort of their space for families by adding outdoor seating and a space for families to store buggies.
  4. Communication: We recommend that Kempton communicate their family-friendliness by adding an additional page to their website under the “learning” tab dedicated to families. This page should include pictures of families, a description of their family-friendly and accessible offerings, and tell the story of clean drinking water in a way that children can easily understand.
  5. Reflecting their community: We recommend that Kempton create opportunities for children to create and display art in their museum. They could utilize the play area in our recommendation on increasing welcome and add a station with art supplies and coloring pages. This should include a prompt that encourages children to consider the importance of water in their lives and the world. The station can include tape and a poster where they can display their drawings. Once the poster is full, a photo of all these drawings can be digitally published under the new family webpage suggested in our recommendation on communication.
  6. Addressing variety in family composition: We recommend that Kempton introduce a family ticket that provides a discount to parents and seniors, increasing economic accessibility. We also recommend they develop an additional guidebook tailored towards children and families by including coloring pages, cartoons, and easily digestible text.

Prototype results and recommendations

  1. Welcome Video:
    1. Findings: 16 unique visitors watched some portion of our welcome video. Of these, eight were children and three were parents from two unique families. Four of the six people we interviewed after watching the video praised Samantha’s enthusiasm for the engines. They noted areas of improvement in correcting autogenerated subtitles captions, increasing the volume, and adding more content. Based on this feedback, we corrected subtitles, increased the volume, and added images.
    2. Recommendations: Recommendations We recommend that Kempton film more videos about the building of the engines and the museum’s history and restoration efforts. These videos can be spread throughout the museum on various touchscreens, allowing visitors to learn about the museum throughout their visit in small, digestible chunks.

      Figure 2: Piston-cylinder assembly

  2. Piston-cylinder assembly:
    1. Findings: Findings Thirteen of 21 participants successfully completed the assembly. Twelve of these 13 were with their family, and only one was an adult without children present. Visitors struggled especially with attaching the hand crank, but every child who started building persevered and completed the puzzle. We iterated on our prototype by improving and reprinting the handle and crankshaft to remove the need for a connecting pin and by creating a QR code that links to an assembly demo video.
    2. Recommendations: We recommend that Kempton reprint the parts of the piston in higher quality and glue one sample assembly together permanently for reference. In the long term, we recommend they consider ways to add a water or steam element to motorize the spinning of the piston.
  3. Matching Game:
    1. Findings: We invited 31 unique visitors to participate in our matching game, including 11 individuals from three families, 17 solo adult visitors, and three Kempton volunteers. Over three-fourths of visitors were fully engaged with our prototype and nearly two-thirds participated for at least two minutes. One-half of the eight visitors we interviewed commented that our images were blurry, so we enhanced image quality following testing.
    2. Recommendations:We recommend that Kempton replace paper images with additional 3-D models to increase the realism of our exhibit. We also recommend that the exhibit include a free sticker or a book to sign upon completion to keep a reward mechanism in place when staff are unavailable to moderate the activity.

Limitations and conclusions

While we planned to test and iterate our prototypes several times, Kempton sees very few visitors on non-Steaming Weekends, which shortened our iterative design schedule to include only one round of testing. Our prototypes therefore require further testing before they are permanently implemented. Furthermore, while our prototypes were effective at engaging a wide audience, they still require volunteer facilitation, which is not always possible. As such, several of our recommendations focus on ways to implement these prototypes permanently without the need for facilitation. Despite these limitations, our project sets the foundation for the Kempton Steam Museum to improve its family-friendliness and establishes a framework for which other museums can evaluate and improve their own offerings.