State-of-the-Art Analysis - Thomas Ziegelbecker

At the moment the museum of our choice already offers ways of interaction, for instance: 

• A wall with pictures of animals with a control panel, where one can highlight a certain animal by hitting a button with the corresponding name. 
• A map where one can see the population spread, starting from Africa
• Horses that kids can feed with small fake bread
• Games to match cans with words (animals) 
• Listening to sounds
• TouchTable

During the observations we used the following means to draw our conclusions:

• Fly on the wall
• Qualitative Interviews 

Conclusions from the observations
The majority of devices/interfaces in the museum were screens, which are either controlled by touch or some kind of a roller ball in combination with buttons. The response time of the latter was often perceived as very slow, which made the interaction rather cumbersome. Most of the times the screens were used for quizes, which could be described as text heavy. Thus, I believe most of them are not really suitable for kids. Kids rarely stopped in front of plates in order to read text, but only when there is some kind of interaction.

Conclusions from the interviews
Kids remember two parts of the exhibition the most, first the Dinosaurs, and second the "The human animal". The reason for that might be because the former shows impressive huge bones and kids usually love dinosaur, and the latter offers the most interactions in the whole museum (i.e. games, explorative things to touch and modify). Another finding is that there is no form of interaction among visitors at all. Only a few kids actually picked the museum for the visit, instead their parents brought them in order to learn something, thus, the main goal is to educate kids