TY - GEN
T1 - Engaging families around museum exhibits
T2 - 2020 Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC 2020
AU - Horn, Michael S.
AU - Banerjee, Amartya
AU - Bar-El, David
AU - Wallace, Izaiah Hakim
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Brian Magerko and Jason Freeman from Georgia Institute of Technology, and Aaron Price from the Museum of Science and Industry, for their assistance with interface design and data collection. This research was supported by grants DRL-1612619 and DRL‐ 1451762 from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/6/21
Y1 - 2020/6/21
N2 - Over the last decade, large multitouch displays have become commonplace in museums and other public spaces. While there is preliminary evidence that exhibits based on tangible technologies can be more attractive and engaging for visitors than displays alone, very little empirical research has directly compared tangible to large multitouch displays in museums. In this paper, we present a study comparing the use of a tangible and a multitouch tabletop interface in an exhibit designed to explore musical rhythms. From an observation pool of 791 museum visitors, a total of 227 people in 82 groups interacted with one of the two versions of our exhibit. We share the exhibit design, experimental setup, and methods and measures. Our findings highlight advantages of tangible interaction in terms of attracting and engaging children and families. However, the two exhibits were equally effective at supporting collaborative interaction within visitor groups. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for museum exhibit design vis-à-vis visitor engagement and learning.
AB - Over the last decade, large multitouch displays have become commonplace in museums and other public spaces. While there is preliminary evidence that exhibits based on tangible technologies can be more attractive and engaging for visitors than displays alone, very little empirical research has directly compared tangible to large multitouch displays in museums. In this paper, we present a study comparing the use of a tangible and a multitouch tabletop interface in an exhibit designed to explore musical rhythms. From an observation pool of 791 museum visitors, a total of 227 people in 82 groups interacted with one of the two versions of our exhibit. We share the exhibit design, experimental setup, and methods and measures. Our findings highlight advantages of tangible interaction in terms of attracting and engaging children and families. However, the two exhibits were equally effective at supporting collaborative interaction within visitor groups. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for museum exhibit design vis-à-vis visitor engagement and learning.
KW - exhibit design
KW - informal learning
KW - interactive tabletops
KW - multi-touch displays
KW - museums
KW - tangible interaction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087424863&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85087424863&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3392063.3394443
DO - 10.1145/3392063.3394443
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85087424863
T3 - Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC 2020
SP - 556
EP - 566
BT - Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC 2020
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 21 June 2020 through 24 June 2020
ER -