Designing With Web - Part 3: week 1

Improve museum visit experience for schools based on gaming

Group 11

Project 1: Museuming

Context

when? where? who? why?

Museums give children the opportunity to access knowledges differently than what they are used to in school. They increase their cultural capital, learn subject-specific content and skills and acquire critical thinking. Seeing the real world can even get them excited to go to school! But more often than not, school trips to museums are felt as a burden by kids, who suffers endless days of wandering through dusty exhibitions, passively listening about stuffs they don’t feel connected to or implicated in.

Interactive learning overcomes this problem by delivering a mindful and engaging experience. In fact, it has been proven that kids remember up to 40% more informations by “saying and doing” rather by “seeing and hearing”.

Gaming is an excellent way to supply active learning. By including rules, definitive objectives, measurable goals and competition, it brings a sense of achievement, and since it is entertaining, children keep coming back to learn more. With gaming comes several skill developments: cognitive growth (solving problems, thinking creatively), digital literacy (communication, ethics) and coordination (spatial, fine motor). And, contrary to a common belief, gaming is not exclusive to the digital world and electronic devices. There are many types of gaming with dozens adapted to gaming with no equipment, and some examples may include: alternate reality games, role playing, simulations, strategy, puzzles, interactive fictions and social games. Actually, gaming is just making a creative use of its environment and whatever is available to play games!

When it comes to implementing gaming into museums, a lot is still to be done, especially to fit for school trips. Teachers who wants to organize a school visit based on gaming will be restricted by the very limited amount of museums with gaming equipments, and the incapacity of a majority of them to suit a class of kids. The choice of a museum should not be based on whether it possesses gaming facilities, but rather on the teacher’s learning objectives, and the gaming part should be added on top of that.

Our idea with this project is to remove the burden of missing devices from museums and give teachers a solution to adapt gaming with a group of kids to any desired exhibition.

Target

for whom?

The main targets of this project are teachers who wants to organize school visits in museums based on gaming, but haven’t access to museums with gaming facilities or are willing to go to specific museums that aren’t equipped for gaming.

The idea is mainly directed towards classes of children in primary school, since older students will have less difficulties to maintain attention with passive learning, but the interactive feature makes it usable for learning programs of all ages.

Service offered

what? how?

We are creating an application that gives convenient gaming ideas to put in place with a class of children for chosen exhibitions. The application will be based on a catalogue of gaming ideas shared by other users, each being adapted to a specific museum or type of museum.

A search engine will allow to find games by categories: museum, size of the group, average age of the group and type of gaming.

For examples:

    • Search: American Museum of Natural History of New-York, 12 kids, age 12-14 and role playing.
    • Result: By groups of 4, find a representation of Ancient Greece that you like and try to imagine the myth that it depicts. You will recreate and play the scene you came up with in front of the other groups. You will then learn the true story behind it and see how far you were from the truth.
    • Search: Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, 20 kids, age 10-12 and strategy.
    • Result: The museum is burning and all the exits on ground floor are blocked by the flames. By group of 5, prepare an escape plan for your class by only using objects from the exhibition, and explain how you would use the chosen objects to save your classmates. Beware, the fire spreads fast and your time is limited!
A “score and comment” functionality will enable the search engine to sort the games by popularity and let the teacher make a choice based on the existing feedbacks.

As the number of user will grow, the amount of games available will follow consequently, with the possible birth of an active community of museum-gaming lovers, seduced by the combination of learning and fun (like there was with escape games, where you were playing a role game while thinking hard).

Identity

describe the universe around your service by creating a mood board and name your service accordingly

Benchmark

List concurrents / relative projects and describe how they relate/differentiate to your project

  1. Online platforms for interactive learning based on gaming.
    Problem: They are not related to museums.
    • Funbrain: Website with learning content for grades K-8. The basics are represented well with grade range and original content. Funbrain offer interactive flash cards, a newsletter and links to teacher resources.
    • ABCya!: Website focused on game-based learning, providing options for grade levels Pre-K to 5. With family as well as classroom login access, it facilitates game-based learning via classroom or parental collaboration.
  2. Gaming experiences in museums.
    Problem: They rely on a specific exhibition and are not suited for school trips with large goups of children.
    • Palais Garnier in Paris, immersive game “Inside Opera”: Players are guided by actors in period costume to solve puzzles and lift the curse of the Phantom of the Opera.
    • UK’s Science Museum, games through its app: Game that allows users to design and test their own space rover.
    • NYC science museum, Rugged Rovers game: Teaches about the design process that engineers use to design, test and iterate. It teaches this by doing, but never explicitly say this is what is happening.
References

books/films/articles/...

Project 2: The Jarvis Project

Context

when? where? who? why?

Museums give access to wonders and knowledge that school doesn’t provide. That's why it's essential when children have the opportinuty to visit one of them that they acquire knowledge. However schools trips to museums are rare and too often an opportunity for children to mess around. Why is that so ? Because children get easily bored in what seems for them endless halls of various displays.

We want to make this change. To do so, we want to introduce more technology into cultural museums and with technology provide a more playful experience for the kinds in order to keep their mind brisk during the whole length of an exhibition. In fact, some studies have come to the conclusion that children remember up to 40% more informations by “saying and doing” rather than “seeing and hearing”.

This project revolves around the use of augmented reality or AR. To test our concept we decided that our groundbase would be the Natural History Museum of London for it has a lots of entertaining and huge displays has dinosaur’s skeletons or contemporary stuffed animals like the elephant.

Target

for whom?

The main target of this project are museums who want to attract more people by dynamising their exhibitions and especially more school groups.

The concept, in partnership with the National history Museum of London, is mainly directed towards classes of young children from 6 to 14 years old. Nonetheless some part of the porject can be adapted for all ages and translated into several languages.

Service offered

what? how?

The application we are thinking to develop could provide many services. It's main goal is to increase the attractiveness of museum exhibitions for groups of young people and especially classrooms.

Nowadays everybody has a smartphone, even children in elementary schools. So teachers will have an easy access to our application. At first you will have to select the museum you go to, for exemple we chose the London museum of Natural History. Through augmented reality (using the camera of your smartphone) children will be able to choose an avatar, among the displays of the museum (for exemple Dippy the diplodocus fir the National History Museum of London) that will be theirs for the rest of the exhibition.

Then by selecting the room or area of the museum they are in they get access to all that is at display there. Students will have to scan a flashcode in order to dislay some part of the exhibition in augmented reality. Once there they can manipulate the art or the object and discover by themselves. Additional informations on whats been scanned will aslo be provided to the student for a short period of time.

Afterwards he or she will have to answer a small multiple-choice questionnaire that will award points for good answers. At the end of the exhibition all scoreboards are gathered and the three students with the higherscores are awarded a ticket for two to go see another museum. Hence they can discover multiple museums and their wonders.

Identity

mood board

Benchmark

References
Some articles, videos or websites that inspired us