Playful and educational tour through Poperinge
Lessons in old writing for teenagers, cooking with recipes from the First World War, Domino Day with archive boxes, geocaches and escape rooms. With these kinds of actions, the Poperinge-Vleteren Intermunicipal Archive builds bridges between children, young people and the local heritage. Many class groups and holiday camps visit the reading room every year. In Poperinge, children can now also get to grips with history in a playful way outside the walls of the archives.
Intern Yaicke Maselis (VIVES), together with archivist Tijs Goethals (IGA Poperinge-Vleteren), designed an interactive walk for families with children at ErfgoedApp . To get closer to their world, Yaicke developed fun puzzles, assignments and quiz questions. In addition to various game forms, the makers have also linked a short educational section to the various stops. If you are looking for more explanation, you will find simple links to, among others, Westhoek verbeeldt, the regional image bank with beautiful old photographs that you will come across during this walk.
Yaicke and Tijs also contacted the artist Doreen Logie. Charlotje Keikop, known from the comic strips in the Poperinge town paper, soon turned out to be the ideal character to accompany the walk. Families with children can follow and help her during her walk.
Doreen created a number of new characters in addition to her existing ones, and also based herself on some well-known women who coloured the history of the city. So we find out what Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie did in Poperinge. Or how Leontine Permeke was one of the first female photographers to flourish in a typically male world.
For the archive, it was an obvious choice to put women at the centre of this walk. Although Countess Maria van der Steen de Jehay and Baroness Valentine Terlinden became the city's first honorary citizens after World War I, women have remained in the background for too long in Poperinge's history. As an extension of the More Women on the Street campaign, the makers went in search of women from recent and less recent history who deserve a place in the street scene. The search turned out to be easier than expected. The archive visitors were happy to help and in the end even choices had to be made from a large group of interesting ladies. For now, they are only visible digitally, but who knows, this walk might result in the first female street name in Poperinge!
