Beyond museum walls: A transmedia approach to fostering multimodal literacy and STEM engagement in Science Discovery Children’s Museums

As digital transformation reshapes early childhood education, Science Discovery Children’s Museums (SDCMs) emerge as uniquely positioned spaces to foster rich, multimodal learning environments that extend early literacy learning beyond the museum walls through family engagement. This paper presents a case study of an 8-week transmedia program co-designed with an Australian SDCM to foster young children’s multimodal literacy development through STEM-based family interactions across physical and digital contexts. The entry-level transmedia approach layered curated digital content and home-based activities onto an existing STEM exhibition, combining online activities, hands-on problem-solving, and museum visits. A total of 76 families, including 85 children aged five to nine, participated. Data sources included individual semi-structured interviews with 20 children and 16 adults from 15 families, along with 12 SDCM staff involved in program development and implementation, as well as digital platform analytics and social media interactions. Four narrative vignettes illustrate outcomes. Through analysis, themes were constructed to illustrate how children applied literacy practices across modalities such as gesture, image, text, speech, and material exploration, supported by parental scaffolding and collaborative reflection. The program fostered multimodal literacy development, intergenerational learning, and sustained engagement through STEM contexts. Framed within a multimodal view of literacy, computational thinking was conceptualised as a literacy practice involving the purposeful use of symbolic systems to make meaning, solve problems, communicate ideas, and construct knowledge. Children demonstrated computational thinking as a literacy practice through decomposition, pattern recognition, and algorithmic reasoning while developing scientific identities through playful inquiry. Parents became co-learners, creating reciprocal exchanges that strengthened family connections. Findings position SDCMs as transformative early childhood literacy learning environments and offer practical strategies for equitable, accessible digital engagement. This study contributes to understanding literacy as a socially situated, multimodal practice and provides a replicable, resource-efficient approach for cultural institutions seeking to extend multimodal literacy learning beyond physical boundaries.