ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the techniques that can be used in association with museum work that come under the general heading of simulation. One of the major criticisms of simulation in relation to museums is that it is a creative activity in which people make things up. Historians also make things up the only difference between them and writers of fiction are that what they make up has to be verifiable with what is known about the period of which they write. Story-telling, drama, role play, theatre, living history, re-enactment and simulation games are not, of necessity, pieces of fiction. Simulation provides a wide variety of direct experience of conditions of human existence connected with derived from the parts of material culture. Simulations give pupils the chance to work successfully in ways other than the standard classroom format and so discover that there are other routes to learning particularly ones that are not dependent upon the written word.
