ABSTRACT
As a member of the museum family, children's museum can be treated as an informal learning environment. This chapter first introduces the Chinese education system. It is pointed out that there is an internal need to transform Chinese education from a structured, mostly unified, and somewhat stressful system to be a system that sparks learning interest and encourages free exploration, self-directed learning and individualized learning, and children's museums can play a role in it. Further, this chapter presents the informal learning theory and related concepts before summarizing the features of children's museum as an informal learning environment. Learning in children's museum is featured by informal, free-choice, individualized, contextualized, interactive, play-based learning, with emotional connection, and implicit. Then the chapter gives a formal introduction of the impact literature, in both educational and social perspectives.
