8 Ways Moment Factory is Redefining Learning Through Experience

We know this to be true: immersive learning inspires empathy, agency, and action. It supports multiple learning styles while strengthening curiosity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence — creating a lasting impact.

This is the power of experiential learning design, and it is reinvigorating how museums, cultural institutions, science centers — and even cities! — create meaningful experiences that engage visitors of all ages.

Here are 8 ways Moment Factory is shaping the next generation of immersive learning.

1. Designing the world at a learner’s scale

Imagine being a child, exploring a world built to measure. Nothing activates a sense of wonder and curiosity quite like it. The most transformative play environments are those built for their audience. They become experiential learning vehicles, encouraging self-directed discovery and learning through play. At Moment Factory, we act as master planners, shaping multisensory worlds where kids can explore, feel, and co-create through active learning. Our approach blends story-based learning with purposeful educational content, supported by rigorous UX testing to ensure accessibility, engagement, and, yes — joy.

Curiosity Cove

Curiosity Cove is a permanent large-scale indoor attraction designed for children aged 3 to 12. Organized into more than 30 zones across four ecosystems, this hypernatural playscape welcomes kids to move like wildlife, leaping, crawling, and responding to immersive installations that engage their senses. By encouraging children to inhabit animals, Curiosity Cove blends physical and empathetic play, nurtures emotional connections with nature, and delivers lasting educational value, rooted in active discovery and wonder.

2. Sparking empathy through multisensory edutainment

Chances are you remember your favorite stories and facts because they moved you. Multisensory edutainment facilitates experiential learning through genuine feeling and empathy. By encouraging audiences to step inside new perspectives, cultures, and histories, we lean on multisensory edutainment to shift the learning process from observation to concrete experience, turning emotion into lasting insight.  

Anisipi

Anisipi is a discovery route designed in collaboration with the Pikogan community, celebrating water (Anisipi is the Anicinape word for “pure water”) and local culture. Visitors step into a teepee to hear and experience Anicinapek stories through multimedia and light. This seamless fusion of narrative and environmental design turns cultural heritage into an experience that connects visitors to the rich local culture. 

Onhwa’ Lumina

Onhwa’ Lumina weaves together sound, light, and storytelling to tell the story of the Wendat community. Symbols and rhythms guide visitors through a poetic journey in which they explore the cycle of life, the passing down of knowledge, matricentric traditions, and the deep connection between all living things. The experience is further enriched by an online educational resource that expands the narrative beyond the trail and facilitates project-based learning.

3. Illuminating heritage and the unseen

Some stories are hidden beneath our feet or locked inside abstract ideas. Immersive installations bring these narratives to life by transforming unexpected spaces into experiential learning environments. Light, sound, and interactive media turn history, heritage, and complex concepts into moments of awe — and real understanding. When we encourage participants to see their surroundings differently — to observe, wander, and uncover meaning in the world around them — we are literally reshaping the mold of experiential learning design. 

The AURA Series

The AURA series brings global architectural icons to life, illuminating cultural heritage. Each awe-inspiring show reveals the site’s history, leaving visitors with a lingering sense of wonder that deepens their connection to the landmark. Heritage becomes a living, breathing story, alive in the present and connected to the future for audiences of all ages. 

AURA at Grace Cathedral offers locals and visitors a powerful encounter with San Francisco’s culture of conservation and creative expression, weaving together past and present, tradition and innovation in a single immersive experience.

AURA Invalides transforms a national monument into a multisensory exploration of its construction, its living memory, and its power to inspire, inviting visitors to intimately connect with the site and rediscover it through sound, light, and collective wonder.

4. Cultivating a sense of impact

There’s no debate — when learning meets play, learning becomes fun. We believe that fun also turns learning into action. The key lies in designing experiences that let participants become decision-makers and prompt them to test hypotheses, collaborate, and directly interact with complex concepts. Through this brand of experiential learning, visitors of all ages gain a sense of ownership over global issues and an intimate understanding of the impact their actions have in the real world. Experiential learning turns doing into real understanding.

Innovation: Earth

The Immersive Gallery at the Museum of Science (MOS) in Boston operates as an innovation lab, using a renewable content model to stage rotating multimedia experiences. Innovation: Earth helps visitors understand their individual and collective impact by challenging them to confront climate change head-on. Guests learn by doing, testing sustainable solutions within a responsive urban landscape and actively troubleshooting real-world challenges. In the process, they become invested in the mission and gain a sense of agency and ownership.

5. Transforming the audience into creators and experts

Experiential learning works best when people feel ownership over the experience. That’s why we design interfaces and digital tools that turn learning into an act of creation and discovery. Instead of simply absorbing information, visitors get to experiment, build, edit, and explore, picking up complex skills and sharpening their critical thinking along the way. By putting multimedia tools directly in their hands, we shift the experience from passive watching to active participation.

Animation Adventure with Molly of Denali

This multi-room experience inside Science World’s Creative Technology Gallery welcomes children aged 3 to 12 through interactive spaces that reveal the creative process. In the "Build" room, visitors use kiosks to discover hands-on the process of animation and editing, reinforcing the project’s mission to inspire youth in British Columbia’s creative technology sector. By role-playing the part of animation artists, children engage in an all-immersive learning experience they’ll remember long after their visit. 

6. Engineering story-driven, transportive spaces 

Awe. Wonder. Delight. This is the impact of good storytelling, the spark behind learning that lasts — and our approach to experiential learning design. By designing story-driven spaces where technology and creativity collide, we help organizations create environments that gather communities, ignite curiosity, and invite one and all to actively experience stories that stay with them. At the heart of our work is a simple belief: stories should be felt, not just told. By transforming them into interactive gameplay and immersive environments, we invite participants to step inside the narrative, shape it, and carry its impact into the world beyond.

The Perpetual Story Machine

In The Perpetual Story Machine, The Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream (MCAAD) transforms the safeguarding of history into an interactive adventure. By harnessing innovative technology and a blend of animation, live-action video, gameplay, voiceover, original music, and soundscapes, The Perpetual Story Machine redefines what immersive storytelling can be, inviting participants to step in, explore, and unlock the stories woven throughout the experience. In doing so, visitors take an active role in bringing the past to life, preserving it through lived experience.

7. Turning passion into learning through active fandom

By placing audiences at the heart of worlds they know and love, we turn fandom into discovery, transforming passion into knowledge through play and interaction. In the context of IP-driven experiences, this means moving beyond traditional exhibits to create environments where fans actively engage with the content for an exciting new dimension of experiential learning. Whether rooted in a well-known figure, a brand, or a sports club, IP becomes the backbone of a fully realized world and the catalyst for thrilling, immersive journeys.  

The Messi Experience

The Messi Experience offers visitors an immersive encounter with the defining moments of Lionel Messi’s life, tracing his path from childhood beginnings to global superstardom. This multi-room journey turns his personal history and career milestones into accessible, engaging content. Recreations of pivotal moments in his life provide meaningful context to his evolution as a player, while interactive games encourage guests to learn and practice his most celebrated skills.

8. Reinventing cities into living museums

At Moment Factory, we believe that cultural institutions don’t need to be confined to four walls. By expanding these spaces into the public realm, layering interactive storytelling onto familiar environments, and treating the urban landscape as a dynamic, responsive canvas, we’re redefining how learning takes place. For us, experiential learning design is the art of fusing the digital and physical worlds by treating the urban landscape as a dynamic, responsive canvas that invites exploration and discovery.

Against the Current

In Against the Current, Art Windsor-Essex brings art out of the gallery and into the city. Using a web-based mobile app, participants follow a dynamically mapped route through downtown Windsor, play mini-games, and uncover the stories behind each artwork. Against the Current reframes the traditional gallery visit as a city-wide, gamified discovery hunt that encourages people to engage with art playfully and transforms how they encounter and connect with cultural heritage.

Where experiential learning comes to play

For Moment Factory, immersivity is never an end in itself — it’s a means to create meaning, purpose, connection, and impact. We design learning experiences that inform, transport and inspire, and support institutions in shaping more engaged, aware, and future-ready communities. 

As technologies continue to evolve and vie for our attention, returning to what is most human — learning through doing, through story, and through play (read: experience) — offers institutions a lasting path to relevance, resonance, and real connection.

See how we bring our experiential learning design to life.