From Treasures to Tales to Digital Stories: Co‐Creating a Digital Archive Through Intergenerational Storytelling With Australian Families

ABSTRACT Material things have long encouraged intergenerational learning in museums. Beyond passive objects, things provide opportunities for children and adults to explore and engage in intriguing encounters, provoking shared storytelling and renewing relationships. Following the need to democratise who gets to tell stories about things in museum spaces, we worked with young children and adults to create a digital archive of stories about ‘tiny treasures’—small but special items, such as bejewelled brooches, found coins, collected shells and more—during digital playgroups at the Children's Technology Play Space (a research space located next to a children's museum at the University of Wollongong, Australia). Adapting a long‐standing activity in the children's museum, we invited children and adults to discover and investigate the ‘tiny treasures’ using digital technologies and play‐based inquiry. Children, parents, grandparents and carers generated mini‐collections, shared in conversations, and remembered or imagined tales about the tiny treasures through 3‐D scanning, augmented reality and digital storytelling. We suggest that embracing digital and intergenerational approaches encouraged participants to make connections between different ages, times, spaces, technologies and treasured things, offering opportunities for extending conceptualisations of children's archival practices.