State-of-the-Art Analysis - Petter Janse

There was a lot of things you could interact with at the museum. Both technical solutions, often presented on a computer with touch screen, and more old things, such as pressing a button to turn on the light behind a portrait of the correct item matching the name of the button. It also varied from just passive learning, pressing a button to hear the sound of an animal, to more active learning such as learning games or quizzes. But what actually caught my attention was the fact that I saw no two identical solutions in the whole museum. Instead I saw over 20 (and surely missing some) different ones. Even when switching floor and exhibit they would not bring back an already used one.

From a user view I think there are both pros and cons of this. While a lot of the children we interviewed complemented the variety of things, if one of them was really popular why not use it again in a different exhibit? If we would have had more time I would have liked to make a more thoroughly investigation on which one was more popular among our subgroup. It would have really helped us to understand what they were looking for.

In the end I choose to do my analyze on a less modern (no touch pads) , active game. I felt it was a simply solution but still perfect for both a big age range as well as working both when alone or as a duo/group. The fact that there were not a lot of text to read makes me think our subgroup of children is more likely to use it. For a lot of the other solutions you would get fed a lot of text, which seemed to scare away the younger children.

The way it worked was you stepped up to a window where you could see 10 different mushrooms. Then as you pressed start they would turn around to reveal mushrooms but together with the names now (and in different positions so that you are not only memorizing the order). Now you had about a minute to learn the names of the mushrooms before they turned around again to only show the mushrooms. Then your task was to match the mushrooms with their correct name by pressing the buttons listed as 1-10.

The pros of this solution is as I said previously that it works well on a variety of people. It was simple enough to understand for both children as well as older people who might not be have the technical knowledge to use a touch screen. I also liked the fact that you could see actual mushrooms, and not just pictures of them as with most touch screen solutions. Again its hard to tell what our subgroup really does prefer, real items or a touch screen environment, since we did not investigate this during our time there.

The downside of this game was that it took quite some time, both with the waiting while you try to memorize the mushrooms as well as the answering process where you have to stop and think for each of the 10 mushrooms. In a busy day with a lot of people passing by only one person/group in every five minute or so would be able to use it. Other than that I could see no problems with it and I could easily have seen it be replicated for other exhibits, for example doing it with insects.