In my almost six years at the Museum, from fall of 2012 until now, I have held the same title, but sat at five desks in four offices and reported to three supervisors in three different departments. As you might imagine, as my work focus evolved and expanded over the years, it has been hard at times for family and friends to follow these changes (luckily, “He does something at the dinosaur Museum” can satisfy most).
I am proud of all the work that went into the initiatives I was asked to advance. I figure, on the eve of my departure from the Museum, now would be a good time to explain what exactly I have been doing all this time, highlight the three main areas of my work, and flesh out the diverse nature of these activities while illuminating the threads that tie them all together. [Spoiler alert: my work has been a robust exploration of how youth development, design practices, and digital pedagogy can advance a museum’s capacity to engage learners – in the Halls, in classrooms, and online – in exciting and innovative ways.]
Virtual Wonder Cabinet in the Hall of African Mammals. 1.13
- DIGITAL YOUTH LEARNING STRATEGY
I arrived in October 2012 in a new position at the Museum: Associate Director for Digital Learning (re: I am Joining the AMNH & What’s It To You). My mandate was to develop and lead a new Digital Youth Learning Strategic Plan in our after school programming (Youth Initiatives), building on a strong foundation of experiments that pre-dated my arrival.
We aimed to better understand how informal science learning could be enhanced through digitally-based pedagogies and tools. While efforts drew from existing programming, we primarily focused on piloting original courses. These pilots were designed to be high risk and to suggest new directions that could be incorporated into existing or new programming, whether through the adaptation of new digital tools, new curriculum, or new pedagogy.
After launching 66 new (or modified) programs over four years, in the spring of 2016 I wrote a report detailing the growth and spread of digital learning pedagogies, both within our Youth Initiatives programs and, through collaboration, other areas of the Education department and the wider museum. In short, the efforts to implement a digital learning strategy within our youth-serving programs were effective: we increased the number of digital tools in use, doubled the use of digital tools of science, and, so importantly, deepened the integration of substantive digital practices within our courses. While once siloed, the sites of digital innovations have spread throughout the department. In addition, significant infrastructure challenges that prevented the application of digital learning have been resolved.
As a result, the Digital Youth Learning Strategy had broad reach within our classrooms and exhibit spaces:
- 1,721 youth in courses reached
- 17,145 visitors in Halls reached
In addition, outside the walls of the Museum, 63,000 people were reached online.
These programs were organized according to two emerging strategies: Innovations in Youth Learning and Innovations in Visitor Engagement.
Innovations in Youth Learning
The youth programming was broken down according two subcategories – Authentic Digital Tools of Science & Emerging Digital Innovations.
Authentic Digital Tools of Science: This strand of youth programming explores how to leverage the tools used by scientists within an educational youth content. Some highlights include the following initiatives:
- Morphobank is an online tool scientists used to collaborate on morphological data, co-developed by AMNH scientists. Working with these scientists, we adapted it for use within a youth curriculum, which led to its use across many programs.
- Capturing Dinosaurs was our first youth program to incorporate the processes of digital scanning and fabrication (in which youth used mobile apps to scan real dinosaur fossils then fabricate them on printers to build a model). This lead to a wide range of youth programming (around topics like mammals, microfossils, and more), public programming (at I.D. Day and during our Sleepovers), and online (by sharing the models produced for others to use).
- Visualizing Climate Change began a deep exploration (that continues to this day) of how to bring science data visualization into our courses, both as practiced by scientists to advance knowledge of the natural world and by science communicators.
Emerging Digital Innovations: This strand of youth programming explores how we can leverage the educational affordances of tools that were not designed for use by scientists, nor even educators. Some highlights include the following initiatives:
- The Virtual World Programs were a set of offerings throughout the year which used game or data visualization engines as the primary educational tool, such as exploring undersea life during the Cretaceous period using Second Life, global food distribution networks through Minecraft, and investigating what happened to the Neanderthals through interactive virtual dioramas in Skyrim.
- The ambitious #scienceFTW program taught science content by pairing youth with Museum scientists to play and critique content-related games. This led to more than a half dozen programs that partnered youth with game designers to work with assets from the Exhibitions and Science departments to produce exhibit-related card games, to be sold in our stores and offered for download at our website.
- The youth in the MicroMuseum program collaborated with science experts, an app developer, and a digital youth media specialist to create a prototype for what would eventually become MicroRangers, an augmented reality mobile game that offers visitors a digital layer over four of the Museum’s permanent halls, in a race to stop the sixth extinction.
Innovations in Visitor Engagement
The primary contribution to Innovations in Visitor Engagement revolved around efforts to augment the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians (which informed the efforts which led to the Hall’s current restoration process). This work focused on the Video Bridge, which used telepresence robots to connect visitors with member’s of Canada’s First Nations represented by the cultural treasures that fill the Hall, and Dreams of the Haida Child, an AR-coloring guide created with a Haida artist that contextualized the Hall’s treasures and “brought them to life.” In addition to work for this Hall, other efforts involved MicroRangers (described above) and Crime Scene Neanderthal, a prototype for a mixed-media, facilitated engagement within the Hall of Human Origins.
Galactic Golf in the Hall of the Universe (with a Hololens). 6.17
- SCIENCE VISUALIZATIONS
In June of 2016 I moved from Youth Initiatives to the newly named Science Visualizations Group (formerly Science Bulletins), also within the Education Department.
Much of the youth design work I had been leading – like in the programs that developed MicoRangers and Dreams of the Haida Child – would move from the background to the foreground, while my youth development responsibilities would do the opposite, moving from the foreground to the background. During the year that followed, I would always be connected with youth programming, but the bulk of my time shifted to prototyping and evaluating new ways to engage visitors in our permanent halls with the digital specimens developed and studied by Museum scientists.
We were looking for answers to questions like:
- Can we turn scientist’s digital data into Hall-based interactives?
- How can we augment static displays with digital specimens?
- How can we enhance public understanding of data collection and visualization?
- How can we create a social experience around digital specimens?
Using a wide-range of emerging media (AR, VR, MR, tabletops, gesture-based, iPad) and science content (astrophysics, mammalogy, paleontology, and more), I worked with our team to develop a process that regularly brought prototypes out into our Halls, offering visitors a sneak peak at a possible future, and supervised the evaluation team and process. During FY17, we spent 57 hours over 34 sessions observing 1,047 people and interviewing 522 people who experienced the interactives. We also conducted several studies to understand visitor behavior in the Halls.
Prototyping and evaluation gave us a clearer view into the kinds of experiences the Museum might choose to develop in the future, and how to build in-house capacity to produce these interactives. We ended the year by making a series of recommendations (many of which are now being implemented in the current year).
While I was working with the Science Visualization Group to learn about the visitor experience, at the same time I was working across the Education department to advance the Museum’s understanding of science visualization as a vector within youth learning. I co-lead a process that brought together scientists and science educators around the Museum to participate in an ongoing design process. We created the first documentation surveying Sci Viz activities in both the Science and Education departments, brought in speakers from visualization labs at other museums, and held a design charrette to develop ideas we might prototype, among other activities.
This process lead to a series of four innovative Sci Viz youth programs in the current fiscal year, two focused on astronomical data, one exploring how imaging technology is used (in cutting edge earth science, paleontology, mammalogy, and physical and cultural anthropology research), and one highlighting the role of interactive G.I.S. visualizations (in flamingo conservation research). Two of the courses worked with new prototypes of Sci Viz instructional tools, supporting youth learners to use augmented reality to hold CT bat skulls in their hands, or explore G.I.S. data on a touch table interface and ground truth their models. Finally, I am leading an extensive evaluation of the courses and, at the same time, preparing the youth in these course to become informed, critical consultants to the Museum as this work advances.
Bat CT scans in the Hall of New York State Mammals (through a Holocube). 4.18
- PROTOTYPING AND EVALUATING VISITOR ENGAGEMENT THROUGH EMERGING MEDIA
In the fall of 2017, my focus broadened once again. The very prototyping and evaluation work I was doing within the Science Visualization Group would now expand to inform visitor-facing activities across the Education department. Now, the questions we are currently exploring include:
- What patterns are we seeing in terms of visitors and those who participate in emerging media experiences?
- In what ways does participating in an emerging media experience affect the visitor in terms of dwell time in particular exhibition areas?
- In what ways does participating in an emerging media experience affect the visitor in terms of understanding key phenomenon, concepts or science practices?
To answer these and other questions, we are collecting data through bringing prototypes out into the Hall, as we did in the previous year, and through bringing emerging media with existing content into our public events, like the Margaret Mead Film Festival and family events about ocean life and outer space. Visitors are using virtual reality gear to explore the ocean floor, tangible AR (Holocubes) to play with CT scans in their hand, Kinnect-driven gesture-based controls to pose with constellations on a giant screen, and more.
As I write this, we are entering the final phases of data collection and analysis, and will soon move on to interpreting the data and making recommendations for how the Museum might leverage opportunities to use emerging media to deepen visitor engagement within the Halls.
Looking back at these past years, my work has been a robust exploration of how youth development, design practices, and digital pedagogy can advance a museum’s capacity to engage learners – in the Halls, in classrooms, and online – in exciting and innovative ways. As I prepare to leave the Museum, I am pleased about the impact we have had on both youth and visitors. At the same time, I am excited about the capacity that has been expanded within the Museum, created in part by these initiatives, to develop even more engaging and meaningful learning experiences in the future.
Dr. Mary Blair of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation hears a presentation from Youth in the Visualizing Science course about how to create a distribution map through entering geographic coordinates from specimens into a computer. 4.18
