Understanding Complex Learning in an Informal, Interactive Museum Experience

• In Event: 54.064 - Engaging Complex Social and Scientific Issues in Informal Learning Spaces

Abstract

Connected Worlds is a 2500 sq. ft. fully interactive, social museum experience on systems thinking about environmental sustainability. Created for NYSCI’s landmark Great Hall, Connected Worlds welcomes up to 50 museum visitors at a time to engage in a variety of gestures and to manipulate objects as they deepen their understanding of how complex human and natural systems couple.

Connected Worlds immerses visitors in a fanciful universe where they can affect the health and balance of six distinct, yet interconnected habitats, fed by a 40-foot virtual waterfall that spills out onto a floodplain. Through gestures and manipulation of physical objects exploring these dynamic, connected ecosystems, visitors develop collaborative strategies for managing their main finite resource: water and experience how individual and collective actions can have widespread impact. They plant seeds, direct water and interact with whimsical creatures. Virtual creatures and plants thrive or decline based balance state of the environments The simulation is designed to provide an experience in which visitors encounter issues broadly considered “systems thinking”: questions of sustainability, balance and feedback loops.

The exhibition is enhanced by Global View, a multi-touch table, which presents, in real time, a schematic of the status of the water and health of the plants and creatures across all the habitats. Collaborative groups may monitor the dynamic and complex.
The experience runs in two modes: freeplay and facilitated group challenges. Freeplay is a lightly facilitated experience for casual museum visitors. They can explore, play, discover all the connections in Connected Worlds and notice how the plants and creatures respond to their interventions. The facilitated group challenge is a scaffolded experience offered to school groups. After a brief introduction and time to explore the exhibition dynamics, visitors are presented with a challenged appropriate for their age group.
In designing the programming around Connected Worlds, we faced many challenges:
· How to leverage the experience so that the visitor ‘discovers’ the system at work through their explorations?
· With many changeable variables such as evaporation rates, water availability, plant growth rate, how could we best help the visitor notice the connections and relationships with so much going on?
· What kind of experiences best suits visiting school groups or families where multiple ages may be present?
I will be discussing the extension testing process we engaged in over the course of designing and developing the exhibition and how it impacted and changed the direction of the exhibition.
I will also cover the subsequent year+ of testing on facilitating the exhibition from the soft opening in April of 2015 to the present.
An exhibition of this magnitude was virtually impossible to test in its entirely prior to installation and required extensive onsite testing with museum visitors. Our experience will inform both academics and museum professionals about the importance and process of testing an complex interactive experience. I will be drawing the results form our exhibition team, education staff and in house design-based research team.

Author

• Geralyn Abinader, New York Hall of Science