Children’s Interest in Dinosaur Museums and Dinosaurs in Thailand

Museums, exhibits, and displays regarding dinosaurs are a key influence in children’s development, creating understanding, knowledge, and awareness of the natural world, and even influencing their future career choices. Unfortunately, upon preliminary literature reviews, there is little information and studies concerning this subject in Thailand, leading to the formation of this research. Accordingly, this research aims to explore opinions and attitudes regarding dinosaurs and dinosaur museum exhibits in kindergarten, primary, and secondary school students, and the pursuit of future career choices, through a quantitative research, acquiring data from 518 Thai students in kindergarten (n=40), primary (n=262), and secondary (n=216), covering all regions of Thailand. Results showed that a little over half of the children surveyed had never visited any dinosaur museums, resulting in the X museum visited per person of only 0.64. This is mainly due to the distances between the museums and the children’s respective residences. As for children who’d visited dinosaur museums, the most liked exhibits for kindergarten and primary students are animatronic exhibits, whilst, for secondary students, it is the dinosaur fossil/bone exhibits. On the contrary, the most disliked exhibits by kindergarten, primary, and secondary students are dinosaur fossil/bone exhibits, animatronic exhibits, and dinosaur model exhibits respectively. Alternatively, children who like dinosaurs outnumbered those who don’t (79.54% and 20.46% respectively), with the preference for dinosaurs largely being due to movies/cartoons (49.76%). Among these children, most want to become Paleontologists and Paleo-artists (25.00% and 22.09% respectively). Unfortunately, data also reveals that 75.73% of the children who want to become Paleontologists have obstacles, mainly a lack of knowledge about institutions with a Paleontological program.